Ketosis.  In a word, this is the reason we are so fat, but it is also the solution to belly fat and stored fat in general.  When the body can get its energy supply from currently digesting food, it avoids using stored fat.  That digestion cycle takes 12 hours — so for that period there is little to no ketosis, that is, when the body is substituting stored fat as it energy source.   Unfortunately, Americans tend to eat once again either before that 12 hour deadline or soon after, so that the body never really gets going with ketosis — thus the inability to reduce belly fat because we eat too frequently.

But here’s also where the solution lies, for any time past 12 hours that you don’t eat again, your body is now in full-blown ketosis mode.  So if you go for, say, 16 hours from one meal…

Visions of the apocalypse —
Sodom and Gomorrah cites all ablaze
My mind’s eye sees in a glimpse.
Just raise time’s perennial haze.

The Dark Ages come again.
Frightened humanity shudders within.
Disease and strife abound,
Wailing voices the only sound.

If this story should ever relate,
My next breath I would gladly forsake.
My grave a preferred domicile,
For mankind becomes an imbecile.

All Poetry — Henry Barnard

My Story

Facebook is becoming Porn Central.  Russians and Facebook — that’s getting all the attention, even though there’s quite a bit of doubt just how widespread the Russian Facebook impact was on the presidential election.  But Facebook is slowing sliding into a pretty deep cesspool of rather raunchy pornography, and unlike the tiny drop in the bucket of the Russian influence on Facebook, pornography on Facebook is becoming a tsunami.  Yet there’s no media coverage of that story at all.  Why?  And you’d think by now there would be an uproar by parents, given the salacious exposure to their children, but there hasn’t been a peep.  Again, why is that?

My Story

When you are into nutritious, plant-based eating, you can’t help but take a peek at what foods other people in the checkout line are buying.  I was really shocked today when I observed what this old man who was just in front of me was buying.  There were no vegetables or fruit at all — zero, none.  He bought a large amount of soda — a six pack of sugared Coke and a dozen of those little bottles of diet Ginger Ale.  There were two large bottles of wine, a loaf of white bread, a quart of ice cream, and a package of chocolates that claimed to contain some peanut butter.  That was it.

The man was only slightly overweight but somewhat stooped, possibly from early onset osteoporosis; his skin was splotchy with rashes on the face; and his thinning hair was lack luster with large clumps of hair missing…

You don’t have to be Walter Mitty
To come up with a pretty little ditty.

You don’t need the approval of a committee
To write down verse very witty.

Just use imagination itty-bitty,
And you will compose something nifty.

You don’t need to employ outlaw banditti.
You don’t need to call a subcommittee.
You don’t need anyone else’s pity.

Just imitate the antics of your little kitty,
And throw the dice in dear old New York City —
That’s the nitty-gritty.

So hippity hoppity too
And bippity boppity boo.
Serendipity truly loves you.

All Poetry — Henry Barnard

My Story

In the middle of my back there is an itch.
I twist and squirm but cannot reach it — it’s a bitch!
Mind over matter, philosophers say, melts that witch,
But, try as I might, I really could use a switch.

All Poetry — Henry Barnard

My Story

The big political story in the United States is becoming less and less about the various bogus political attacks against Trump, and more and more about the splintering of the Democratic Party into two mutually distinct and potentially incompatible camps — the traditional Democrats (who have held power) and the so-called “progressive” wing of the party whose members tout themselves as “socialists”.  The fissure between the two groups is growing larger and larger, to the point where one might conjecture a complete rupture of the party where the progressives break off to form their own new party.

My Story

Recently, a senator claimed he was having his Spartacus moment, indicating that he was going to the mat for some principle, risking being expelled from the Senate because of his unruly behavior.  That was hardly the case.  It turned out to be quite a joke on this “brave” politician, as the supposed confidential information he said he was revealing at his own risk had already been approved to be released.  Hardly Spartacus; more like unintentional, egg-in-your-face comedy.

But there has been a true American Spartacus in our history, even though he himself was not a slave nor a black man.  His name was John Brown, an abolitionist but with a puritanical, visceral hatred of that “peculiar institution,” American slavery.

Financed by a cabal called the “Secret Six,” a small group of well-off abolitionists in New England, John Brown went about acquiring 950 pikes and 198 Sharps Rifles for a planned…

Where were you before birth?
And after death?
In the same non-existence?
You pass from one into another non-existence.
No choice, pre-planned.

One loses only the present moment in death.
One gains only the present moment in birth.
You are a captive of it,
For there is nothing else –
There is no future
And no past…
Illusions.

Let your mind roam free today.
Let it leap with associations.
Let it inspire with originality.
Let it frolic in the lush pastures of pure thought.
Let it rejoice, complete and entire unto itself.

For we are silly little things,
Trapped by a narrow existence,
Snared by time and space.
Yes, “a little soul carrying a corpse.”
Indeed, Epictetus.
But your mind, that is free —
Free as a bird.

All Poetry — Henry Barnard