Phat Unplugged

The diet you described in Message 16 has some good aspects, like decreasing your carbohydrate intake, hopefully with emphasis on eliiminating simple carbohydrates, but it sounds like one of the variants of a keto diet, which are all fad diets. You're looking for a magic bullet. There isn't one. All diet programs are failures.The long term success rate of diets in the general population is 10-20%. Under most circumstances such a low success rate would be the death knell and people would abandon them in droves, but many Americans are desperate to lose weight, and so the diet industry has been with us for a long time and will continue to be so, regularly introducing new appealingly packaged diet programs accompanied by food products you can order online or even find in your grocery store.Terms like fat adaptation and achieving ketosis to burn fat is terminology used by diet quacks to sound plausible and scientific. If you're not seeing an MD then you're seeing a quack, though even some MD's are quacks - Trump's doctor from before his election was a quack. The White House physician Ronny Jackson adopted some quacky qualities over time, perhaps influenced by his increasing use of alcohol and pills.The best diet advice is from Michal Pollan: "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants." Inherent in his advice is to avoid processed foods (that means avoid most aisles in the grocery store).Your issues sound persistent and of longstanding. I think Metformin would be inadequate for you, though it's probably worth a try if you haven't tried it already. When metformin doesn't work then the next thing to consider is semaglutide. You would take it under the care of a medical specialist, usually a specialist in diabetes. A responsible MD will prefer to use it with those already eating right and getting regular exercise because semaglutide is only an assist (a powerful one) for achieving a healthy weight and better numbers on the standard blood panel. It cannot by itself make metabolic syndrome or diabetes go away. Semaglutide is approved by the FDA for treatment of diabetes, and from what you say you're a valid candidate for it, but if not you need to find an MD willing to go off-label and prescribe semaglutide for weight loss. The FDA is on the cusp of approving a higher dosage version of semaglutide for weight loss, if they haven't already. Cost is around $800/month, you'll need your insurance.--Percy

That equates to a blood sugar of around 270, a very dangerous level. You're at high risk for complications like heart disease, neuropathy, kidney damage or failure, vision damage or even blindness, and vascular cognitive impairment.That last one, vascular cognitive impairment, would explain the gibberish you've been posting recently. I assume friends and coworkers are beginning to give you odd looks after you speak or do something. I assume your life is becoming increasingly chaotic as you become less and less able to manage the routine activities of daily life, such as taking medicine, buying groceries, doing laundry, preparing meals, paying bills, etc.Three years ago your A1C% was 7. That it's now 11 means you're not even trying. I'm guessing you've let your weight balloon, you're probably above 230 now. If you were following any legitimate diet at all your A1C would not be anywhere near 11. You may be in a mental state that makes it difficult to reliably follow a diet or medical directions.You didn't answer my questions. The one about metformin is irrelevant now - an A1C% of 11 is way beyond what metformin is appropriate for.At an A1C% of 11 you must be on insulin. If you're not get on it immediately.I don't know if semaglutide is appropriate at your A1C% level, you'd have to seek medical advice.About your doctor, is he the one who talked about "full ketogenic adaptation"? The one under whose care your A1C% has risen to 11? If so then run, don't walk, to a highly respected diabetes center. Possibilities are the Barbara Davis Center for Diabetes or the UCHealth Diabetes and Endocrinology Clinic, but there must be many high quality providers in the Denver area.--Percy

Being social, interacting with other human beings, is healthy. Withholding it from yourself is just another poor choice you've made.What you (and many others) need to find is a way to free yourself from seeing the world in terms of conspiracy theories and mystical answers.--Percy

You're not interested in the give and take of discussion? Why are you at a discussion board?Is it possible that working in a grocery store is an enabling situation for you?--Percy

Salads are a healthy food choice, until they're not. Lettuce is an excellent delivery system for cheese and croutons and calorie rich dressings. With them salads are very filling but no longer healthy. Without them and with only a light vinaigrette hunger strikes within the hour, and then you'll seek out snacks to tide you over until your next meal. The diet then becomes a willpower diet, meaning it will work for as long your willpower against hunger holds out. For most people that's not very long. Poor food choices - you're surrounded by them.--Percy

We can't help you. Your mind is in thrall to conspiracy theorists and disaster mongers.You've said all this before. We rebutted it before, but you just repeat it all over again. There's no help for you. You're doomed to be one soldier in an army of Chicken Littles.If you sounded the alarm about something real, like erosion of our democratic institutions or climate change, then people might start listening to you.--Percy

That should be a warning sign for you right there. It's been nearly a hundred years since the US was on the gold standard. It's been a good long time since any meaningful currency has been backed by gold.You've been told, more than once, that there isn't enough gold in the world to back the world's currencies, that the world population grows faster than the gold supply. If the world's currencies were backed by gold there would be less and less money to go around and the world would become more and more poor.When the world population was only a billion or two and there was much less wealth it was possible to back currencies with gold. That is no longer possible and hasn't been for quite some time. Your talk of a gold standard is just rubbish. Why, since you "don't understand some of the concepts," are you asserting anything? Why do you think you know enough to reach any conclusions? Why are you listening to scaremongers?Instead of pausing your participation here you should have stopped listening to YouTube videos. Look, we get it, what they say tickles a part of your brain that feels good, but it's all nonsense. These guys are on YouTube not because they know anything but because they have a knack for making appealing YouTube videos.You would be much better served trying to figure things out, connect the dots, learn how things really work. Master some of those concepts that seem so nebulous to you right now. And stop issuing silly warnings.--Percy

Seriously?Unless this is a joke or a sarcastic response to how obvious jar's question was, you need serious help.--Percy

That's not what sarcasm looks like. Stop saying things that aren't true. No one said they're smarter than you. Your posts exhibit a high frequency of demonstrated error, ignorance and naiveté. People have been commenting on this in an increasingly derogatory manner because you've become more and more persistent and determined to keep at it while ignoring the often informed feedback being provided. Sure go ahead. This is from How High Are Federal Interest Payments? | Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget:

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This year, the federal government will spend $300 billion on interest payments on the national debt.

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Here's a higher figure from Interest on the National Debt and How It Affects You:

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The interest on the debt is $378 billion.

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That figure can be found in their referenced document Budget of the U.S. Government in the table on page 112 under the 2021 column for the "Net interest" line. I don't know why the difference from the other figure, but one possibility is that how much interest we incur and how much we actually pay in any given year are not the same thing.But our interest payments will be growing over the coming years, soon passing the figure you cite, though you don't say where you got it. According to the aforementioned table, we won't surpass $500 billion for five more years. 9% of what? Federal revenue? The budget? 9% of federal revenue for fiscal 2021 is $348 billion. Uh, no. Why do you think this? What crazy YouTube guy are you listening to now? Not counting the pandemic, US productivity has been on a general upward trend for decades. Most countries throughout the world engage in deficit spending because of its stimulus effects. The analogy is home buying. If everyone waited to buy a home until they had saved a few hundred thousand dollars very few homes would be purchased. Use of mortgages (deficit spending at the personal level) enables everyone to live a better life. This is nonsense. We are not losing our ability to produce, just look at our GDP. Who is filling your head with this nonsense? Why do you constantly think it sufficient to throw cockamamie ideas out into the discussion without justification? Did you ever stop to think, "Is the US actually losing its ability to produce? I should go look up recent GDP trends." This is word salad. Do even *you* understand what you're trying to say? You're trying to convince us of ideas you've picked up from people who don't know what they're talking about. Whenever your information is faulty or doesn't make sense we tell you, but you just ignore us, wait a day or two, then say it all over again. You are both gullible and delusional. When circumstances reach the point where you have to tell people , "I'm no dummy," guess what?--PercyEdited by Percy, : Add link to US Budget.

The relevant line of the table on page 112 of the Budget of the U.S. Government is labeled "Net interest," implying that we're both paying and receiving interest. I couldn't find any clarifying information in the document.--Percy

Found the explanation at Federal Net Interest Costs: A Primer | Congressional Budget Office:

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At a Glance
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Components of Net Interest. In the federal budget, the category of spending called net interest comprises the government’s interest payments on debt held by the public, offset by certain types of interest income that the government receives. Some of those payments and receipts are intragovernmental transactions on accounts that are not related to the public debt and have no effect on the overall federal budget.

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What Is Net Interest

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The government pays and collects interest in various ways. Net interest consists of the interest it pays minus the interest it receives. The outlays largely reflect the interest paid to holders of the debt that the Treasury issues to the public. Although the Treasury also issues debt to trust funds and other government accounts, the payment of interest to those accounts is an intragovernmental transaction that has no effect on the budget deficit.

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The net interest costs shown in the budget include interest paid on all Treasury securities ($523 billion in 2020), minus the portion of that interest that is received by trust funds ($135 billion in 2020) and the net amount of other interest and investment income received by the government ($43 billion in 2020). The last category consists primarily of net receipts to the Treasury from the financing accounts that track the cash flows of federal credit programs (mostly student loans).

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The federal government’s interest payments depend largely on interest rates and the amount of debt held by the public. Other factors, such as the rate of inflation and the maturity structure of outstanding securities, also affect interest costs. (For example, long-term bonds generally carry higher interest rates than do short-term bills.) Interest rates are determined by market forces, such as the supply and demand for Treasury securities, and the policies of the Federal Reserve.

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--Percy

$300 billion is clearly wrong. It seems to be a common mistake on the Internet, but I'm sorry I wasn't more thorough initially. If you type "federal debt interest 300 billion" to Google you'll get a list of sites that have it wrong, including the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and Mitt Romney's official Senate website.But when Phat cited a different figure I went to the US budget to get something authoritative, and it gives $378 billion in net interest for fiscal 2021. I think net interest is a better figure figure than total interest paid for calculating the proportion of federal revenues going toward interest, and that would be 378/3860 or 9.8%.--Percy

What an odd post. I don't know what you mean by sources, I might tend to include more links than other people, but I don't think my opinion differs from anyone else's. The only thing you know about the "global money system" is how to use words like "global" and "money" in a sentence.You've been given accurate information about how things work over and over again and never given any indication of understanding it. You mostly ignore it. I'm becoming uncertain that you know what it feels like to comprehend something.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Typo.

Edited by Percy, : Grammar.

It took you two weeks to reach this impossible conclusion? Math is just a word to you, isn't it? A quick mental calculation, a sanity check, so to speak, to make sure that what you're about to say isn't completely idiotic, is a sheer impossibility. Am I right?Here's the quick mental math you should have performed. The projected federal deficit for 2021 is $2.3 trillion. The net interest I cited from the federal budget was $378 billion. Round the numbers off to do some quick dividing to get a rough ballpark figure, i.e., divide $2400 billion into $400 billion to get 1/6, which anyone familiar with math knows off the top of their head is 16.7%. Or you could just type "378/2300" in to Google, which yields 16.4%.Since interest rates are nowhere near 16.4% the $378 billion in net interest I mentioned could not possibly have been on the annual deficit. Please try again.You are impossible to discuss with because posts correcting your errors are just launch points for you to make more errors.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Typo.

There's an entire cascade of things you're just not getting. Every attempt to correct your misunderstandings just creates more of them. This is hopeless.Give it up. You're never going to get it.--Percy