The downside of the treadmill desk.

Typos.... "up to 11% deterioration in fine motor skills like mouse clicking, and dragging and dropping, as well in as cognitive functions like math-problem solving."

It's silly to walk on a treadmill or pedal a stationary bike while trying to work, but I highly recommend using a desk like this with a push-button motor that lets you move back and forth between sitting and standing. Here I am demonstrating it 2 years ago.

We liked it so much we bought a second one. Bought a second 27-inch iMac too.

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Another risk of fatness: health-care professional who too readily attribute any health problem to fatness.

UCLA sociology professor Abigail Saguy explains :

Scores of studies have shown that medical providers typically regard fat patients as lazy, self-indulgent and noncompliant. As a result, heavy patients don’t always receive the health care they deserve....

Many heavy women told me that doctors routinely blamed any ailment, from a fall to a sore throat, on their weight....

So there may be mistakes in treating fat people. That's plainly wrong and easy to condemn. It's harder to know how to react to criticisms like this:

One woman I talked to visited a new gynecologist, who, during her annual exam, began lecturing her about her weight. When the patient said she did not want to discuss weight loss, the doctor backed off. She resumed her lecture, however, during the pelvic exam, when the patient had her feet in stirrups and a speculum inside her. She told me she felt as if she were mentally “going somewhere else” — not unlike how many women feel while being sexually abused.

This is close to an etiquette consideration: What can you say to a woman while penetrating her vagina? From the patient's perspective, it's hard to know how tolerant or outraged to be. I think some doctors are obtuse about what they can say while they're probing a woman's intimate parts. They might think it's a good time for casual conversation, precisely to demonstrate how nonsexual what they are doing is. The woman might endure the situation, then feel bad about it afterwards. But I don't see much connection to that problem and the fact that one of the casual conversation topics the doctor might introduce is the way you need to lose weight. It's not a good time to try to take advantage of your close connection to the patient!

Finally, there's the health issue of stress, which can grow out of the problem of being overweight. Prof. Saguy seems to say that any message to fat people about the problem of fatness might only make matters worse. Elsewhere, I've seen commentary suggesting that it's the other way around. Lessening the social pressure leads more people to get and stay fat. Who knows where the greatest health risks lie? And should our decisions about how to talk to fat people be based on what's best for their health? Maybe not!

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Diet tip: "Wait 20 minutes for seconds."

Reason this should work: "Food must move 22 feet through your intestines from your stomach to peptide YY cells — the switch that says you are sated."

That's very helpful. Not that I want to think about the location — somewhere in the long, twisted path through my intestines — of what was so recently in my mouth, but I've noticed the tendency to eat and then eat again. It seems to be easier to avoid eating all afternoon than to resist getting one more thing after dinner. The dessert impulse. Even after breakfast or lunch, there's this feeling of needing to eat again. So the idea is: Just wait 20 more minutes. If the science quoted above is accurate, the feeling will ebb. Tell yourself: I can have something more if I still want it 20 minutes from now. The meal you just ate will, by then, have arrived in your peptide YY cells (whatever that means).

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"As she struggled to reclaim her memory, Shawnda discovered she had been a life-long keeper of journals."

"She found them stashed in a box in the spare bedroom... She had taken meticulous notes on her entire life."

Shawnda learned of her troubles with her husband and read in detail about all the pain and depression she had lived through the past several months, and then forgotten. She read of people in her life who were now like characters in a novel she was starting from the middle.

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"Females have biological problems staying in a ditch for 30 days because they get infections..."

An old meme about women in combat. Is it a bugaboo from old farts afraid of ladyparts... or is it real?

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"I think the businesses that bring these men in should also be accountable for not providing opportunities that keep them busy outside of work."

"They should check their employees before hiring (if they don't already) and get rid of those who commit ANY kind of aggression toward women or men. Their social responsibility goes beyond the gate or the door. Maybe the answer is for the towns like Williston to heavily tax the companies so that they can afford to police the men the companies employ. If business doesn't see itself more broadly as a player in the overall health of our society, government needs to step in."

That's a reader comment at the NYT article about all the single men working out in the oil fields of North Dakota, which we've been talking about over in this earlier thread. Please go to that thread to talk about the article more generally. I'm opening up this new thread for discussion of the proposition that business should be responsible for the after-work activities of their employers, that the tendency of men to go out after work looking for female companionship calls for the heavy taxation of business, that individuals looking for sexual relationships in their own free time ought to be conceptualized as an issue of collective "health," that overall societal health requires big "players," and that if businesses don't want to see themselves as the players, they leave a gap that government must fill.

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"What worries me most is winding up a vegetable — any vegetable..."

"... and that includes corn, which under happier circumstances I rather like."

Warning: The linked funny essay is in the NYT and by Woody Allen — cue all the usual attacks — and he sums up with punchline that ends with the words "probably better than being a Republican."

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Tomorrow is my birthday, but today is a day for...

... getting a flu shot — done! — and a mammogram — later. The mammogram is something I'd been putting off, but deciding to go in for the flu shot gave me the push I needed to schedule the mammogram. Dialogue with the nurse:

NURSE: Do you have breast implants?

ME [with slight disgust and amusement]: Nooo! [Changing my tone:] Oh, I mean, I didn't mean any disrespect to the women who have breast implants.

This is the instinctive all-inclusive political correctness I carry about in my daily doings here in Madison, Wisconsin. Not that the nurse would have expressed disapproval if I'd said anything wrong. And I'm not even sure if my self-protective instinctive political correctness is a comic routine. It is something I see myself doing. Sorry if that's TMI on the breasts, but I'm just saying: Come on, everybody, get your flu shots and (if needed) mammograms.

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"The breast pump industry is booming, thanks to Obamacare."

"Tucked within the Affordable Care Act is a provision requiring insurance companies to cover 'the costs of renting breastfeeding equipment'..."

“The law states that we must provide rental pumps,” said UnitedHealthcare spokesman Matthew Stearns. “These pumps are hospital-grade, and they are larger, harder to clean and more expensive than personalized pumps for women. We are providing women the option of getting a personal pump in lieu of renting the more-expensive pump.”

People will do what is incentivized. If breastfeeding is — as we've been told — extremely beneficial to the new baby (and the old baby?), then we ought to want to encourage women to do it. We can't force them to do it, but what we can do is make it easier. I'm very interested in the way the health-care law is going to be a mechanism for manipulating human behavior. By requiring the offering of something that feels like a gift, the government manages the moods of women who would be outraged — rightly outraged — to be told they must breastfeed.

Let's say, now that we're all becoming so involved in the overall economics of healthcare, that we wanted to boost the health of the babies in the insurance pool by making every mother breastfeed (unless she can't and gets a doctor's excuse note). You couldn't simple mandate breastfeeding, because it's too intimately concerned with the woman's body. You'd be violating her rights, but you wouldn't even reach that legal question, because it would be too politically ugly to go there. How about imposing higher health-care premiums for women who have babies, then choose not to breastfeed? That's also unpleasant. And how would you spy on women to check what they were doing? You could slap some big tax on baby formula, but that punishes even the women who can't breastfeed, and it nudges people to buy some alternative product — milk being an obvious substitution.

So make the pumps free so the manipulation feels good.

And here's a business sector that will do fabulously well: the pump-makers. The politicians score triply: 1. Female service to baby health is harnessed, 2. Women feel happy about getting things, and 3. A business booms.

ADDED: Times have really changed:

I remember in the early 70s, Ms. Magazine, in its early days, constantly attacked La Leche League, a pro-breastfeeding group. It was considered anti-feminist at the time to encourage women to breastfeed. Breastfeeding promoters had an ulterior motive (according to Ms.): keeping women at home.

The pump is a device to obscure this criticism. It represents a weird kind of freedom. This human organism needs your body, frequently, but you can get your distance if you attach yourself, diligently and efficiently, to the electrical suction machine. The aesthetics of breastfeeding are radically transformed. The leisure and the ease of natural breastfeeding while tending to various household tasks are superseded by a busy schedule stacked with duties — going to work, getting through work while slotting in the regular suctioning of the mammaries, getting home, taking care of all the same household tasks, and slotting in some time to bond with the child. Was this worth it? Hey, don't be glum. Here's a present for you: A milk-extraction machine. Happy?

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How bad is fat?

12 reasons why it's complicated.

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