What I've Learned So Far This Year

• A GFI (Ground Fault Interrupt) electrical outlet connects to two sets of wires. The LINE is the one that comes from the breaker box. The LOAD is the one sending power to the next outlet on the circuit you want to protect against ground fault. The outlets downstream won't have reset buttons, but may have little GFI stickers. Most important to know: these things get more sensitive with age, and may need to be replaced if they start tripping for no reason.
• Hunger isn't controlled by your brain. It  happens on a cellular level, and your will power has nothing to do with it.
• We've been completely wrong about how fat cells work. And the government is still recommending a diet based on that 5-decades-behind bad information. What they want you to eat may actually make you gain weight.
• We've always thought of fat as storing food energy for much later on, in case there's a famine, in case we can't find any game to kill, in case of a starvation event. But that's not how it works. Fat cells are designed to store fat and release it, alternately, throughout the day and night. Whether it's storing fat or releasing fat (as fatty acids) depends directly on the level of insulin in your blood. The level of insulin depends on how recently you've eaten, and on the proportion of carbohydrates in the food you ate, relative to the protein and fat. And if you consumed processed (white) flour or sugar, your body was able to break it down too quickly, resulting in an insulin spike, resulting in your fat cells storing lots and lots of fat, at least until the insulin levels drop again.
• If you occasionally indulge in white flour or sugar - say, a party and you eat cake and a soda - your body handles the insulin spike as it was designed to do. But if you indulge every day, having a soda with each meal, and a sweet, sugary dessert as well, your body is in a constant state of high insulin, storing fat most of the time and never releasing it, and this results in weight gain. This is how sumo wrestlers get fat - they consume high-carb low-fat food on purpose.
• You need insulin for your muscle tissue to make use of the energy from the food you eat. If you keep this high-carb diet up as a lifestyle, for years and years, your muscle tissue develops a very unfortunate tolerance for insulin, and thus needs more insulin just to keep you moving around. Your pancreas steps up the production of insulin, and a vicious cycle begins. Muscle tissues get more tolerant of it, as a sort of addiction, and the pancreas keeps increasing its production levels. Fat keeps getting stored, and  never released, and if you restrict your calories and fat intake like your doctor says, your metabolism slows down to keep you from starving. Eventually, you get diabetes when your pancreas can't keep up with the demand for insulin.
• Since I read about this in Good Calories, Bad Calories three weeks ago, I have cut out refined sugar and flour from my diet completely, and confined my carb intake to "carbs that matter," such as fruits and vegetables, and I have not made any conscious effort to control my caloric intake. I have lost 3.5 pounds, or about a pound a week. I find that I get full with less food, and I don't miss the sweets all that much. (I use Splenda in my coffee.)
• So those health food nuts that told us to avoid white flour and processed sugar... were right.
• There will be an annular solar eclipse soon, visible in the American west. An annular eclipse is when the moon blocks the sun, but it's too far away to block it completely, so you see a ring of fire around the sun. You still can't look directly at it, but it's still neat.