Link Roundup 06/02/12 - salvaging the most common New Year's resolution

I'm working on some meaty research posts, but these tabs keep choking up my browser. They're valid, they're just not making my life easier where they currently are, so you get them!

Why titring up to 80% works for some people, while others need to go cold turkey. This is written about dieting but would apply to any behaviour change, making it of interest to public health people broadly. (Also of urgent note to SRH professionals in particular - and I am painting myself with this brush here - are the unspoken consequences of hormonal birth control.)

For those who tend to go whole-hog on dieting here's evidence that even switching to the healthiest diet (winner of said title TBC), if it causes the results advertised on the tin, will backfire over an unimaginably long time.

So before you give up your New Year's weightloss resolution entirely, or get squirrely-dedicated to it, check to determine what your basal metabolic rate is - the number of calories you need to run your body without getting out of bed. Then log your meals for a week and go to FitDay to determine if you're getting roughly what you need. If you've cut down too much, you may look great now - you might even feel great, thanks to a surge of stress hormones that make you feel very alive - but you'll bonk. And it will be the bonk from hell.

For those trying to lower their carbs but struggling with fat metabolism, here's a post that saved me from hours of research on a question that's been niggling at me for a while now: what makes peoples' gall bladders hurt so badly that lopping them off seems like a good idea? When will we learn that there's no such thing as a redundant organ? (Appendices are the seed bank for your gut flora, to get you going again after illness. Complete mastectomy has a crap risk-benefit ratio.)

If you've figured out your preferred change model, got your nutritional intake over the start line, are sedentary no more than 23.5 hours a day, and are still not seeing results, have an honest look at this checklist of possible stumbling blocks; it might sting, but it's true.

None of which is going to move you any closer to the elusive butterfly of happiness if you ignore the greater context of being human. We need connections of many kinds and without them we are Dorian Grey.