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hrm - mothers

One of the motivationquotes today was:

Pearl Buck
"Some are kissing mothers and some are scolding mothers, but it is love just the same."

That may be the case from the mom's side, but from the kid's side that's bullshit....

weight: possible lead on leptin

One of the side affects of weight loss is that your body becomes more efficient. AKA, losing weight? Must not be enough food! Must conserve fuel! Or as Gina Kolata wrote in the NY Times:

When people lose substantial amounts of weight, their physiology changes so that, although they may look normal, they have all the hallmarks of starvation. Their metabolism slows down, they expend fewer calories when they exercise because their muscles become much more efficient, and their thyroid hormone and adrenaline levels drop. They also have much lower levels of the fat hormone, leptin.

This, naturally, causes the weight to come back. Repeated diet-and-regain is called "yo-yoing". I've read that yo-yoing has been intentionally used as a treatment for underweight. For most of us, tho, yo-yoing is unintentional. It's how I "dieted up" to my adult weight.

A group of researchers at Columbia University devised an experiment to see whether if they could prevent these changes that occur with weight loss. Leptin, they reasoned, tells the brain how much fat is on the body. But what if the researchers put people - fat and thin - on weight-reducing diets and gave them enough leptin to make their bodies think that they were still fat. The leptin would then serve as a sort of virtual fat. Would the subjects still show the metabolic changes of starvation?

The answer, published in the current issue of The Journal of Clinical Investigation, was that the leptin trick worked. ( more details )

Interesting....

funny from friday's crickler

From Friday's "handicap 22" Crickler:

Japan's Mizuho Financial Group said an order to sell 1 share of J-Com at 610,000 yen was mistyped as an order to sell 610,000 shares at 1 yen.

Chaos ensued at the Tokyo exchange, which lost nearly 2% - while the Mizuho Group ended the day 27 billion yen ($225 million US) poorer!

*facepalm*