For anybody who is losing weight aggressively, there is always a problem lingering in his/her mind. Could something go wrong if the weight loss goes too fast?

This is a legitimate question. Besides exercise injuries and minor side effects of low calorie diet such as diarrhea and heart burn, there is another complication which is less common but also real. Studies have consistently found that those who lose weight rapidly using extreme low calorie diet may be in a higher risk of developing gallbladder stones. In a pooled analysis of several small weight loss programs, the authors found that weight loss is related to the risk of developing gallbladder stones in an exponential curve fashion with the threshold at 1.5 kg per week (3.3 pounds per week). The incident rate is 5 per 1,000 at 1.5 kg weight loss per week, while it is about 1.7 per 1,000 at 2 kg (4.4 pounds) per week, a triple increase of risk. It seems I am lucky that I hadn’t had symptomatic gallbladder stones during my aggressive weight loss. Thank goodness!
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Last Sunday, when I stood on the scale, I was shocked to discover that I had gained four pounds during the Thanksgiving holiday. Gaining a little weight during the holiday was expected because I had indulged myself in delicious foods and laziness, but I didn’t expect to gain so much weight. How could that happen?

It is true that not all weight I had put on is fat. A large part of them must be water. Nevertheless, studies have shown that when regaining weight, the body is more likely to deposit fat than lean mass, especially during the fast weight regain. It is possibly because fat can be stored in adipose cells actively and quickly, while the enlargement of muscle mass is a consequence of the increased weight. This is very bad.
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I have several email accounts including official ones from my employer and private ones from gmail, yahoo, and hotmail. Unfortunately, all of them are deluged by spam emails. It is said that spam emails account for 70% of total email volume. Nobody knows who is sending them, but everybody hates them.

In one of my gmail account, for example, there are 118 spam emails during last 3 days. By simply reading subjects and preview, I found the majority of them are selling Viagra and other libido-enhancing pills. There are about twenty emails selling mortgage, stocks and other financial products. I have no idea what the rest of spam emails are selling.
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Losing weight is nothing mysterious. It lies in a basic physics law–energy intake should be less than energy expenditure. In plain English, if you eat fewer calories and spend more energy, you will lose your weight.

One popular idea is that you should lose your weight GRADUALLY –the slower, the better. For example, some advisors from MyFoodDiary.com suggest that if every day you reduce energy intake by 250 kcal and increase energy expenditure by 250 kcal, you will create an energy deficiency of 3,500 kcal in a week, and you will lose 1 lb fat. They also claim that when you lose weight slowly, you won’t lose too much muscle mass, and the body will not over-adjust the metabolic rate. It sounds biologically perfect.
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Based on the number of visits and comments on each post in my blog site, the most popular post is the one about Rachael Ray which I wrote about one year ago. Today after reviewing that post, I was shocked and also embarrassed. Grammatical mistakes are everywhere and the style is a complete mess. All sentences with parallel structures were not balanced, articles were left out in a lot of places, and the tense was not consistent throughout the post. More important, there was no clear logic within the paragraph and between the paragraphs.

I am not sure how I could write such a poor post, but I can assure you that I have read and re-read that post before posting it. In fact, I might be proud of myself for making several parallel structures and using a few high level words.

Therefore, I felt ashamed when I saw more than 2000 people have read that post and three people have even made nice comments on it. They are very kind not commenting on my writings.

After more than one year of blog writing, my English has improved quite significantly. In addition, I am reading grammar and style books these days. They also clarified my many misunderstanding in writing. Accordingly, I have made substantial revisions in case more people will read that post. I guess all of my previous posts should be revised too.

Thank you, my fellow netters. Your kindness is the best support for me to continue my writing practice.

I like exotic foods. One of my favorite is salted red-yolk duck eggs. Except for the red yolks, making salted eggs is simple. After washing fresh duck eggs, you then put them in clean, salt-saturated water (one safe choice is the cooled boiled water). Wait for a few weeks so that salt can permeate the eggs thoroughly. Then you boil the eggs before serving them. They taste delicious.

But how come egg yolks have a red color? The answer lies in the duck’s diet. We know that a lot of foods have carotenoids such as beta carotene. If ducks eat foods that have a high concentration of carotenoids, they will lay eggs with yellow yolks. Similarly, if ducks eat foods that have red pigments, their egg yolks will become red.
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Several years ago, I regularly commuted from my hometown to the college by the inter-city bus. The bus drivers were always the same two middle-aged Shanghainese guys. Both of them were typical Shanghainese (not stereotyping): gaunt and shrewd. The bus drivers were also talkative, but mostly speaking to their fellow Shanghainese who either were working in my hometown or came for business. Apparently, they looked down upon the rest of commuters because most of us were from small rural towns.

It was drizzling that day. As a student who always purchased advance tickets, I sat in the front passenger row just behind the driver seat. One driver was busy collecting tickets and shuffling passengers, and the other was cleaning up the front window. While wiping the windows, the latter might recognized me as a regular student commuter and somehow had some respects to me. With a big smile, he started to explain to me what he was doing. He told me that by spraying some diluted detergent on the window and wiping it with the tower, fog would not form in the window. This was his idea, he asserted proudly. He continued to tell me all sorts of tricks he learned or discovered during more than ten years of driving, which I had no faintest idea. Obviously the conversion impressed me so much that even today I can still recall it vividly. His proud speech, his exaggerated demonstration, and his pseudo-scientific knowledge looked funny then and now.
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Addiction was traditionally restricted to substance abuse. Since the 1980s, researchers realized that the definition of addiction should be expanded to include behavioral addiction. For example, there are many people addicted to gambling, pornography, sex, and since the 1990s, computer use and the internet. Nevertheless, addiction is usually associated with negative things.

Is it possible that people are addicted to positive things? How about workaholic? Or even exercise?
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It has been two years since Iris Chang committed suicide in November 9, 2004. Many people tried to understand why she did that, but nobody can give a satisfactory answer. It seems to me that Iris is predisposed to depression and she might have set herself up when she started working on those arresting topics. Nevertheless, the death of Iris is a loss for all Chinese. Except for her untimely death, Iris lived a fruitful life and was a role model inspiring many Chinese Americans.

In memory of Iris Chang, I have thought a lot about depression recently. How can we treat depression? Medication is one choice, but only for those clinically diagnosed depressed people. For many mild cases and those who are always in blue mood, they need some other advice.
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Tonight when I was doing some research on procrastination, I came across Steven Pavalina’s blog (stevenpavalina.com). It is a fascinating site full of informative articles. In one of Steven’s best articles, he proposed one interesting regime to success: 30 days trial for anything. I sincerely agree with that.

I am a fan of self-experiment. During the past month, I put myself on a tough test: can I lose 20 lb of weight simply by exercise and calorie restriction? Happily, the answer is yes. I lost 20 lb within a month, an unprecedented achievement that deserves applause. This is an example of achieving success in 30 days.

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