The Michael Phelps Diet: Don’t Try It at Home

Swimmer Michael Phelps’s next career may be in competitive eating. Besides grabbing five gold medals at the Beijing Olympics so far, making him the winningest Olympic athlete ever, he’s got to be setting new marks on the chow line.

A New York Post account of Phelps’s… wait for it… 12,000-calorie-a-day diet, gave us a stomachache. Could one human being really consume that much and still be in Phelps’s shape? And could this possibly be healthy for Phelps, even considering his five-hours-a-day, six-days-a-week exercise regimen?

Here’s Phelps’s typical menu. (No, he doesn’t chooseamong these options. He eats them all, according to the Post.)

Breakfast: Three fried-egg sandwiches loaded with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, fried onions and mayonnaise. Two cups of coffee. One five-egg omelet. One bowl of grits. Three slices of French toast topped with powdered sugar. Three chocolate-chip pancakes.

Lunch: One pound of enriched pasta. Two large ham and cheese sandwiches with mayo on white bread. Energy drinks packing 1,000 calories.

Dinner: One pound of pasta. An entire pizza. More energy drinks.

Does a diet like this make sense even for a calorie-incinerating human swimming machine? We checked in with Mark Klion, a sports medicine doc and orthopedic surgeon at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York. He reminded us that the eating game all comes down to basic math.

If you eat fewer calories than you burn exercising, you lose weight. But an athlete like Phelps, who exercises up a storm, has to worry about eating enough to replenish the scads of calories he’s burned. If he doesn’t, Klion explains, his “body won’t recover, the muscles will not recover, there will not be adequate energy stored for him to compete in his next event.”

But what about the choice of foods? All those eggs and ham and cheese can’t possibly be good for him, can they? Says Klion, “I think for him, because of his caloric demands, he can probably eat whatever he wants to.” And besides, Klion says, if you’ve got to eat that much, it better be enjoyable, or you won’t be able to keep up. Phelps might not be so eager to shovel down a pound of tofu in a sitting, Klion points out.

Still, Klion cautions that he knows plenty of athletes who’ve been training for marathons and have gained weight because they thought they could eat whatever they wanted. So it really does take some planning. Some resources on the Web might help, such as thiscalorie-use chart from the American Heart Association and a calorie calculator fromRunner’s World magazine. This calculator from the Calorie Control Council includes a bunch of different activities, from dusting to playing ice hockey.

But these kinds of calculators don’t really apply to a someone like Phelps, who exercises way more vigorously than the typical person, says Kathleen Laquale, an athletic trainer and nutritionist who teaches at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts. Even by athletic standards, Phelps is in his own league. Laquale says cyclists in the Tour de France commonly consume a paltry 8,000 to 10,000 calories a day.

By Sarah Rubenstein

Source:WSJ

Indian PM ‘tragic figure’, govt deeply corrupt: US daily

New Delhi: After the Time magazine dubbed Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as an ‘underachiever’, influential US newspaper The Washington Post has tagged him as ‘a tragic figure’.

The government reacted testily and demanded an apology from The Washington Post.

In the story published with the headline ‘India’s silent prime minister becomes a tragic figure’, the newspaper has described 79-year-old Singh as someone who helped set India on the path to modernity, prosperity and power, but now is in danger of going down in history as a failure. 

Referring to the slew of corruption scandals that have surfaced during his tenure as PM, the daily opines that Manmohan Singh’s image of the scrupulously honorable, humble and intellectual technocrat has slowly given way to a completely different one: a dithering, ineffectual bureaucrat presiding over a deeply corrupt government.

The daily said that for the past two weeks, the Indian Parliament has been adjourned every day as the opposition demands Singh's resignation over allegations of waste and corruption in the allocation of coal mining concessions.

“The story of Singh’s dramatic fall from grace in his second term in office and the slow but steady tarnishing of his reputation has played out in parallel with his country’s decline on his watch. As India’s economy has slowed and as its reputation for rampant corruption has reasserted itself, the idea that the country was on an inexorable road to becoming a global power has increasingly come into question,” the paper said. 

greeing to political historian Ramachandra Guha’s assessment that Manmohan Singh has become a tragic figure in our history, the paper says that the irony is that Singh’s greatest selling points — his incorruptibility and economic experience — are the mirror image of his government’s greatest failings.

“Under Singh, economic reforms have stalled, growth has slowed sharply and the rupee has collapsed. But just as damaging to his reputation is the accusation that he looked the other way and remained silent as his cabinet colleagues filled their own pockets,” it added.

Detailing the history of his being anointed as Prime Minister, the paper says that Congress party led by Italian-born Sonia Gandhi had surprised many people by winning national elections that year, but she sprang an even bigger surprise by renouncing the top job and handing it to Singh.

“In him she saw not only the perfect figure­head for her government but also a man of unquestioning loyalty, party insiders say, someone she could both trust and control. From the start, it was clear that Sonia Gandhi held the real reins of power. The Gandhi family has ruled India for most of its post-independence history and enjoys an almost cultlike status within the Congress party. Sonia’s word was destined to remain law,” it said.

Under attack from a combative opposition over alleged corruption in the allocation of coal blocks and a spate of other scams, the government said it would seek an apology from the newspaper.

"How can a US daily take the matter such lightly and publish something about the prime minister of another country? I will speak to the Ministry of External Affairs and the government will seek an apology from the daily," Information and Broadcasting Minister Ambika Soni told reporters.

Soni termed the report by The Washington Post as a piece of "yellow journalism" and "baseless".

The Washington Post, meanwhile, denied it has offered an apology for the 

article.

Source:Zeenews Bureau

Image:Facenfacts

Indian prime minister’s office responds to Washington Post’s profile on Manmohan Singh

The office of India’s prime minister objected to The Washington Post’s front-page article, published Sept. 5, 2012, on Manmohan Singh’s evolution as a leader.

The following is a letter from the Prime Minister’s office:

Dear Simon,

We do not complain about criticism of the government which is a journalist’s right. But I am writing this letter for pointing out unethical and unprofessional conduct at your part.

I would like to put on record my complaint about your article which was published today on many counts:

— Despite all lines of conversations open, you never got in touch with us for our side of the story though you regularly talk to me about information from the PMO. This story thus becomes totally one sided.

— You have been telling the media here in India that your request for an interview was declined though the mail below says clearly that the interview was declined “till the Monsoon Session” of the Parliament which gets over in two days.

— When I rang you up to point this out, you said sorry twice though you tell the media here that you never apologised.

— Your website where we could have posted a reply is still not working, 11 hours after you said sorry the third time for its inaccessibility.

— The former Media Adviser to the PM Dr Sanjaya Baru has complained that you “rehashed and used” an 8 month old quote from an Indian Magazine.

We expected better from the correspondent of the Washington Post for fair and unbiased reporting.

Without going into your one sided assessment of the Prime Minister’s performance, as comment is free in journalism, I hope you will carry this communication in full in your paper and your website so your readers can judge for themselves what is the truth.

Sincerely

Pankaj Pachauri

Communications Adviser to the Prime Minister’s Office

New Delhi - India

Below is a response to the letter from Simon Denyer, author of the article and our India bureau chief:

Thanks for your comments. I wanted to respond point-by-point:

— I requested an interview with the PM on three occasions, and also with T.K.A Nair, Advisor to the Prime Minister, and with Pulok Chatterji, Principal Secretary in the Prime Minister’s Office. Those requests were either ignored or declined.

— When I made my final request for an interview with the PM in July, I was told on July 30 “The PM has declined all interview requests till the Monsoon session is over.” At that stage the current session of parliament (known as the Monsoon session) of parliament had not even begun. There was no mention of the possibility of an interview afterwards. In any case my story touches on the fact that parliament has been adjourned every day throughout the current session by opposition calls for the PM to resign, which is a story I felt should be told, interview or not.

Indeed, we remain extremely interested in speaking to the prime minister.

— My apology was for the fact that the website was down and the PM’s office could not post a reply directly. As soon as the problem was fixed, I informed them. I stand by the story.

— I spoke to Dr Baru personally on the telephone during the reporting for the story. He confirmed that these sentiments were accurate.

Regards,

Simon Denyer

  

 

By Anup Kaphle

You Can Read the full article here

Source : Washingtonpost.com

Why We're All Addicted to Texts, Twitter and Google

Do you ever feel like you are addicted to email or twitter or texting? Do you find it impossible to ignore your email if you see that there are messages in your inbox? Do you think that if you could ignore your incoming email or messages you might actually be able to get something done at work? You are right!

The culprit is dopamine — Dopamine was "discovered" in 1958 by Arvid Carlsson and Nils-Ake Hillarp at the National Heart Institute of Sweden. Dopamine is created in various parts of the brain and is critical in all sorts of brain functions, including thinking, moving, sleeping, mood, attention, motivation, seeking and reward.

Pleasure vs. seeking — You may have heard that dopamine controls the "pleasure" systems of the brain: that dopamine makes you feel enjoyment, pleasure, and therefore motivates you to seek out certain behaviors, such as food, sex, and drugs. Recent research is changing this view. Instead of dopamine causing you to experience pleasure, the latest research shows that dopamine causes seeking behavior. Dopamine causes you to want, desire, seek out, and search. It increases your general level of arousal and your goal-directed behavior. From an evolutionary stand-point this is critical. The dopamine seeking system keeps you motivated to move through your world, learn, and survive. It's not just about physical needs such as food, or sex, but also about abstract concepts. Dopamine makes you curious about ideas and fuels your searching for information. Research shows that it is the opioidsystem (separate from dopamine) that makes us feel pleasure.

Wanting vs. liking — According to researcher Kent Berridge, these two systems, the "wanting" (dopamine) and the "liking" (opioid) are complementary. The wanting system propels you to action and the liking system makes you feel satisfied and therefore pause your seeking. If your seeking isn't turned off at least for a little while, then you start to run in an endless loop. The dopamine system is stronger than the opioid system. You tend to seek more than you are satisfied. Evolution again — seeking is more likely to keep you alive than sitting around in a satisfied stupor. 

Dopamine loops — With the internet, twitter, and texting you now have almost instant gratification of your desire to seek. Want to talk to someone right away? Send a text and they respond in a few seconds. Want to look up some information? Just type your request into google. Want to see what your colleagues are up to? Go to Linked In. It's easy to get in a dopamine induced loop. Dopamine starts you seeking, then you get rewarded for the seeking which makes you seek more. It becomes harder and harder to stop looking at email, stop texting, or stop checking your cell phone to see if you have a message or a new text.

More, more, more — Interestingly brain scan research shows that the brain has more activity when people are ANTICIPATING a reward than getting one. Research on rats shows that if you destroy dopamine neurons, rats can walk, chew, and swallow, but will starve to death even when food is right next to them. They have lost the anticipation and desire to go get the food. Although wanting and liking are related, research also shows that the dopamine system doesn't have satiety built in. It is possible for the dopamine system to keep saying "more more more", causing you to keep seeking even when you have found the information. How many times have you searched for something on google, found the answer, and yet realize a half hour later that you are still online looking for more information?

Unpredictability is key — Dopamine is also stimulated by unpredictability. When something happens that is not exactly predictable, that stimulates the dopamine system. Our emails and twitters and texts show up, but you don't know exactly when they will, or who they will be from. It's unpredictable. This is exactly what stimulates the dopamine system. (For those of you reading this who are "old school" psychologists, you may remember "variable reinforcement schedules". Dopamine is involved in variable reinforcement schedules. Another reason these schedules are so powerful).

Pavlovian cues — The dopamine system is especially sensitive to "cues" that a reward is coming. If there is a small, specific cue that signifies that something is going to happen, that sets off our dopamine system. So when there is a sound when a text message or email arrives, or a visual cue, that enhances the addictive effect.

140 characters is even more addictive — And the dopamine system is most powerfully stimulated when the information coming in is small so that it doesn't full satisfy. A short text or twitter (can only be 140 characters!) is ideally suited to send your dopamine system raging.

Not without costs — This constant stimulation of the dopamine system can be exhausting. And the constant switching of attention makes it hard to get anything accomplished. Can you do anything to get out of a dopamine loop? Or prevent getting in one in the first place?

Turn off the cues — One of the most important things you can do to prevent or stop a dopamine loop, and be more productive is to turn off the cues. Adjust the settings on your cell phone and on your laptop, desktop or tablet so that you don't receive the automatic notifications. Automatic notifications are touted as wonderful features of hardware, software, and apps. But they are actually causing you to be like a rat in a cage. If you want to get work done you need to turn off as many auditory and visual cues as possible. It's the best way to prevent and break the dopamine loops.

What do you think? How do you deal with dopamine loops? Are you willing to turn off your cues?

Here's the research reference:

Kent C. Berridge and Terry E. Robinson, What is the role of dopamine in reward: hedonic impact, reward learning, or incentive salience?: Brain Research Reviews, 28, 1998. 309–369.

This article has been taken from Psychologytoday

10 privacy settings every Facebook user must know

Though there are several security threats in using social networking sites, still people are amazingly crazy about it. These days FACEBOOK has become the most demanding site for almost every age people. By using Facebook privacy policy one can fine-tune the privacy of the photos, their status updates, and other stuffs. Even you can block people you don’t wanna be in touch with. Facebook’s privacy policy covers almost all the little issues of your account that matters to you. Facebook has its own default privacy settings for its users. But these are not just enough for every user & one may opt to make changes to it. To make you more secure here is my tips:

1. Profile editing: Editing the profile of your Facebook account is the most important thing, where you must know how to manage your personal information like your date of birth, your address, your contact number and stuff. These are the things which are needed to be made private. These issues are essential just to keep yourself away from strangers. So, in your privacy setting, select “friends” in place of public. This is a kind of primary precaution. Here you can also make your profile visible to some selected people & even you can restrict some particular people from viewing your profile contents.

2. Remove yourself from Facebook & Google search results: Most of us want keep our personal life secret due to various reasons. This above mentioned setting is very much useful to them. To make yourself unavailable in the Facebook search you have to go through the following path.

Privacy setting -> How you connect

There are several options available. You can manage them according to your wish. Some people enjoy when they find themselves searching in some search engines like Google, yahoo, Bing etc. But the fact is, sometimes it puts you in some kind of serious problems. So it is always a better option to make you unavailable in the search engines. This can be done by removing yourself from the index of the search engines. Do this by simply deselecting the box of Public search result. The path for this is given below.

Privacy setting ->Apps & websites-> Edit setting ->Public search-> Edit setting

3. Avoid the notorious photo tagging: Many times people get their relationships in some kind of problems just thanks  to the photos of Facebook they are tagged in. Here you may blame their trust on themselves but still this factor is harmful. Though there are several ways to overcome these factors but the simplest way is to avoid showing compromising photos to friends. The path is as follows.

                               Privacy setting -> custom->only me

Remember, this will block all people from viewing any images or videos that you’ve been tagged in. Many Facebook users want their friends to see the photos they’ve been tagged in though. 

4. Protect your personal album& existing photos: You should make your existing photos and albums private. You will never want to share your private photos with all the people, neither even with friends in some cases. So it’s an essential step to make those things private or available to only friends. You can even set privacy per album, which is great.

5. Restrict your apps to use your information: It’s important to understand what of your information applications can access. The more restrictive you make your profile settings, the less information that’s available to applications.

6. Make your contact private: Many people use Facebook for their professional as well as personal use.  When someone start approving friend requests from the people that he doesn’t have strong relationships with, then it becomes more important to limit the visibility of contact details immediately.

7. Avoid frustrating posts on your timeline: Sometimes what happens, after a long time when you come back to your room and check your Facebook account, hoping that there will be a funny comment on your wall to cheer you up, or a picture comment telling you how pretty you are or see a friend request?  But what you see is just weird. Another thing what happens; you just saw a post of your friend showing something exceptional or may be vulgar and when you tried to hide it just posted on your timeline. Try to avoid these types of issues.

8. Keep your friends’ list private: Some of us want to show others that they have huge number of friends or how famous they are but some just don’t. Those who don’t like to show their friend to others have a justified reason behind it. Because sometime what happens, one of your friend just opens your friend list and send friend request to someone anonymously, it may be your girlfriend’s name. To protect your friend list, the path is as follows,

Go to find friends -> Manage friend list -> Edit

9. Instant personalization: This is a service that lets third-party websites to personalize your experience, which is nice, but it also allows access to your personal data which is harmful.

It also let you see relevant information about your friends when you arrive on the partner websites. It is similar to how News feed surfaces the people and things you care about. Instant personalization helps you find friends and interesting content on other websites. They've partnered with a few companies, like Pandora, Bing, Yelp, Rotten Tomatoes, Clicker, Scribd, Docs &TripAdvisor, to make these sites more fun and useful the moment you arrive. They impress you by immediately playing the music you like or displaying friends' reviews or stuff.

10.  Enabling “HTTPS” or Secure browsing: Here you can set up secure browsing or login alerts. Secure browsing browse Facebook securely when possible. And it sends you a mail when you are logged in from a new computer or new computer device. When someone hacks into your account or data no privacy setting in this world can help or protect you. While enabling https service, you can make thing harder for someone connected to the same network to hack your password or data. “HTTPS” is useful to online security on all web services not just Facebook.

These are the important privacy policies that matters a lot while using Facebook. Keep these factors in mind while browsing FB and be secure.