Helping kids scam schools has turned into a full-time job for me.

In ‘The Iron Throne’, the final episode of ‘Game of Thrones’, nearly every decision made was the wrong one.

You can do it. Motor around filling your basket with food before spying the checkouts and picking your poison. Here’s five tips for living life in the fast lane: 5. Skip your greens. Keep away from shopping carts full of strange produce. Anyone with little bags of cilantro or parsley is a guaranteed slowdown because […]

The post #501 Correctly picking the fastest moving line at the grocery store appeared first on 1000 Awesome Things.

The moon is in Sagittarius today.

Kevin Bass, in his blog Nutritional Revolution, with the data driven case on how you can’t blame people following dietary guidelines for a country’s obesity rates.

James Hamblin, in The Atlantic, on the truth behind vaccine injury compensation.

Abby Hartman, in It’s Training Cats and Dogs, with her first person account on walking to, and then away from, treatment for “chronic lyme disease”.

Pic By Alan R Walker – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

       

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Read time: 5 mins

Garfield and Grumpy Cat are selling the same joke. So why do they have completely different digital lives?

This week’s essential listening also includes wild raps from Megan Thee Stallion and crushing grindcore.

Is fish oil really just snake oil?

The elusive, human-sized reptile was nabbed by wildlife authorities.

Yes, 16th-century French astrologer and noted seer Michel de Nostredame, aka Nostradamus, saw the fight for the Iron Throne coming centuries away.

The news comes in the wake of his controversial comments around #MeToo.

Are memes fair use? Or can you be sued for sharing and profiting off them?

Processed food creates a slippery slope where people eat too much of it

A tragic story of a baby born without microglia cells sheds light on brain development

Plastics are the scourge of the Earth: What we can do about it?

The moon still has activity geologically

Your smartphone could soon diagnose your child’s ear infection

They honk to communicate their position in the flock

Let the grease glisten, mayo drip, and soda fizz. Here are three ways to make the magic happen: 1. Veggie Validation. My friend Mike is king of this hilarious move. “Gotta get my greens,” he’ll say, while chomping dill pickles on the couch playing video games. “Carrots are good for you,” he’ll smile, while licking […]

The post #502 Fully justifying whatever horrible thing you’re eating appeared first on 1000 Awesome Things.

Read time: 3 mins

John Geiger, CEO of the RCGS, presents Princess Anne (right) with an RCGS Fellows neck badge in St. James’s Palace today in London as Deborah Apps, president and CEO of Trans Canada Trail looks on. The badge denotes the Princess Royal’s status as an Honorary Fellow of the RCGS. (Photo: royal.uk)

It’s an addition that will make the Royal Canadian Geographical Society that much more royal.

Princess Anne was today made an Honorary Fellow of the RCGS at St. James’s Palace in London, England, during an audience she had granted to John Geiger, the society’s CEO.

Photos to inspire your summer adventures from the new Ultimate Canadian Instagram Photos special issue, on newsstands now. (Photos, left to right, top to bottom: @ms.chels, @roryffarrell, @eyeforthis, @j_macindoe, @theradicalc, @nick_osbourne, @brianwlackey, @ronniekinnie, @anatoletuzlak, @nicolebutzphoto, @gord_follett_photography)

The Atlantic Ocean glitters from the Skyline Trail in Cape Breton Highlands National Park, N.S. Fireworks light the skies over Stampede Park in Calgary. The late afternoon sun peeks through the temperate rainforest in Lynn Canyon Park, B.C. Take inspiration from the 40,000-member strong Can Geo Instagram community and explore the unique places and wild spaces that Canada has to offer this summer. For more wanderlust-worthy images, pick up the third edition of Ultimate Canadian Instagram Photos, on newsstands now.

Actor, athlete and motivational speaker Johnny Issaluk speaks after being announced as the newest Explorer-in-Residence of The Royal Canadian Geographical Society on May 13 in Ottawa. (Photo: Ben Powless/Canadian Geographic)

At 45 years of age, there seems to be very little that Johnny Issaluk hasn’t done or at least tried.

Postpone the pop quiz, torpedo that test, and forget about a tough math lesson today. No, now’s the time when energy bolts blast through brains as everybody revs up for forty-five minutes of whispering, passing notes, and tossing paper airplanes. AWESOME!   Photo from: here — Follow me on Twitter —

The post #503 Walking into class and seeing that it’s a substitute teacher appeared first on 1000 Awesome Things.

Read time: 9 mins

A pregnant woman and a traditional birth attendant ride in a motorcycle ambulance during a simulation of how the vehicle will be used to take women in labour to hospital in Mozambique’s Nampula province. (Photo: EA-HPRO Consortium-IMCHA Initiative)

It was designed and tested in Saskatoon, but now a motorcycle ambulance is helping communities in Mozambique ensure that pregnant women can get to the medical care they and their newborns need. Part of an ongoing series of stories about innovative projects in the developing world, a partnership between the International Development Research Centre and Canadian Geographic.

Everybody loves a good snooze. That’s where you groggily dive back into the sleepy underworld for a few more minutes of lazy-boned bliss before waking up to get your day on. It’s even better when you tap the snooze button with a bit of acrobatic showmanship that keeps you dreaming before your wide-awake self invades […]

The post #504 Acrobatic snoozing moves appeared first on 1000 Awesome Things.

Read time: 3 mins

Read time: 6 mins

Left to right: Wade Davis, Alex Trebek, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Royal Canadian Geographical Society CEO John Geiger unveil a plaque commemorating the official opening of Canada‘s Centre for Geography and Exploration on May 13, 2019. (Photo: Ben Powless/Canadian Geographic)

It was perhaps the biggest night in the 90-year history of The Royal Canadian Geographical Society.

Read time: 7 mins

Alex Trebek addresses the audience at the official opening of 50 Sussex, Canada’s Centre for Geography and Exploration, in Ottawa on May 13. (Photo: Andrew Lessard/Canadian Geographic)

Alex Trebek, The Royal Canadian Geographical Society’s Honorary President, is a lifelong champion of geographical education, having received the RCGS’s Gold Medal (in 2010) and its Lawrence J. Burpee Medal (in 2015) for his contributions to the advancement of geography. Now his legacy will be honoured once more, with the renaming of the RCGS’s Geographic Literacy Award to the Alex Trebek Medal for Geographic Literacy, announced at the official opening the Society’s headquarters at 50 Sussex Drive in Ottawa on May 13. 

A few weeks ago I tweeted about a patient of mine who is maintaining a 19% weight loss for 2 years, and who attributes her success to keeping a food diary and tracking calories, as well as to including protein with every meal and snack.

The point of my tweet was a simple pushback to those who want to claim that calories don’t count or that counting can’t help (like The Economist for instance whose recent article entitled Death of the calorie was the main reason I bothered to tweet), and those who claim that the only way to lose weight is their way (these days that’s usually either #keto or #lchf).

A great many folks weighed in with their success stories, and some pointed to the National Weight Control Registry (where their over 10,000 registrants have kept off an average of 70lbs for 5.5 years). Others though weren’t having it.

Instead they asserted that 95% of diets fail, that the weight loss industry was predatory (much of it is, no argument there), and called people who have succeeded “unicorns“.

Unicorns. Not people. Mythical creatures.

And the implication of course is clear. Sustained weight loss is impossible. Those who succeed aren’t human, or to succeed they employ superhuman efforts, sometimes even described as disordered eating and/or that those who succeed must be miserable. Consequently, trying is futile and those offering help (like me, as to be clear I am the medical director of a behavioural weight management centre) are unethical, and are motivated by greed (despite the obvious irony that those championing non-weight loss programs are targeting the very same population of people and regularly charge a great deal of money for their services).

But boy, there sure are a heck of a lot of unicorns roaming around for something that supposedly fails 95% of the time. Putting aside the anecdotal facts that we all know people who have maintained weight losses as well as my own office based experiences this 2010 systematic review found that one year later 30% of participants had a weight loss ≥10%, 25% between 5% and 9.9%, and 40% ≤4.9%. In the LOOK AHEAD study, 8 years later, 50.3% of the intensive lifestyle intervention group and 35.7% of the usual care group were maintaining losses of ≥5%, while 26.9% of the intensive group and 17.2% of the usual care group were maintaining losses of ≥10%. And in the recent year long DIETFITS study the average weight loss of all participants was > 5%, with over 25% of participants losing more than 10% of their weights.

The Examine.com waterfall plots of the DIETFITS data

(And for an interesting thought experiment, have a peek at this thread from Kevin Bass that argues that even if the 95% failure number were true, those outcomes would be worlds better than the vast majority of medical treatments currently being offered for other chronic diseases)

So where does this 95% number come from? Certainly I could imagine it to be true if the goalpost for successful weight loss was total weight loss and reaching a so-called “healthy” or “normal” BMI. But that would be as useful a goalpost as qualifying for the Boston Marathon would be for running whereby the vast majority of marathoners won’t ever run fast enough to qualify to run Boston. Does that mean non-qualifiers should be discouraged from running and told that running is impossible? It’s also important to contextualize failures. If the methods being undertaken to lose weight are misery inducing overly restrictive diets, it’s not people who are failing to sustain them, it’s that their diets are failing to help them (which, with full disclosure, is the premise of my book The Diet Fix).

As far as what needs championing, it’s certainly not failure. Given the medical benefits of weight loss, as well as the real impact weight often has on quality of life (especially at its extremes), what we need to collectively champion are the embrace of a plurality of treatments (including ethical behavioural and surgical weight management programs and greater access to them), along with more effective medications. What can simultaneously be championed is the removal of blame from the discussion of weight, fighting weight bias and stigma, recognizing that a person need not have a so-called “healthy” or “normal” BMI, that scales don’t measure the presence or absence of health nor measure lifestyles, respecting people rights to have zero interest in losing weight or changing their lifestyles, that there is value to changing behaviours around food and fitness regardless of whether weight is lost as a consequence, and acknowledging that intentionally changing lifestyle in the name of health reflects a tremendous degree of privilege that many people simply don’t possess. 

Given the evidence maybe we can stop with the unhelpful, dehumanizing, and misleading unicorn talk, and while we’re at it, stop telling everyone that failure is a foregone conclusion.

        

Going an hour without power, calculating your carbon footprint, and teaching your family how to use less water. These are just a few of the 16 energy-related challenges that more than 27,000 students from across Canada took part in during the 8th annu…

This is known as The Funrise. Chatty buzz fills office cubicles, laughs echo down high school halls, and the clock ticks a little bit faster as we all smile and get ready for a couple big days of AWESOME! Photos from: here   — Follow me on Facebook — — Email message — “Hey Neil, […]

The post #505 The last few hours before the weekend appeared first on 1000 Awesome Things.

Say the word “dementia,” and most people think about Alzheimer’s disease. We can’t blame them; Alzheimer’s disease affects almost 6 million Americans and many millions more across the world. It is the most common cause of dementia. But d…

Read time: 4 mins

The DSV Limiting Factor in the Pacific Ocean. The world’s deepest-diving operational submarine, it completed several trips to the bottom of the Mariana Trench earlier this month. (Photo: Reeve Jolliffe)

A team of explorers, including a Canadian-born submarine builder, has broken records and made history in a series of dives to the deepest point on planet Earth: the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean.