health | Ryan S. Taylor

Forced Guinea Pig’ism for the Good of Society « LewRockwell.com Blog

Feb 06 2012 Published by ryanstaylor under Health and Fitness

Forced Guinea Pig’ism for the Good of Society « LewRockwell.com Blog

The American Medical Association Journal of Ethics has an article positing mandatory participation in clinical vaccine trials. Volunteers for these trials have declined substantially over the years. The article states low compensation as a primary reason, leaving students and the unemployed as the primary guinea pigs. So what is they answer to increase participation in vaccines and medicines that may or may not work, or have severe side effects? Mandatory volunteers! The authors have the gall to compare compulsory participation in medical experiments to jury duty. Look, I’m 100% against compulsory jury duty and I do whatever I can to avoid it, but comparing sitting in a jury box for a week or two to getting a shot or taking a pill and not know what the hell will happen to you is absurd. Yet, this article is published in a prestigious medical journal.

Look for this to creep in as an amendment to ObamaCare, lobbied heavily by Big Pharma and the neo-Nazi, nanny, busybody health bureaucrats.

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Mobile phone users suffering from text neck – Telegraph

Oct 09 2011 Published by ryanstaylor under Health and Fitness, Motivation

Mobile phone users suffering from text neck – Telegraph.

Ailments are like products in the medical profession. You always have to come up with something new to sell to your patients. Text neck sounds just like one of those new products.

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Book Review: A Course in Weight Loss

Feb 06 2011 Published by ryanstaylor under Goals, Health and Fitness, Motivation, Success

A Course in Weight Loss: 21 Spiritual Lessons for Surrendering Your Weight Forever, by Marianne Williamson

I was hesitant to write a review of this book, not because it was bad, but because it was written for women. There is no specific mention of the book’s target audience on the back cover, but within the first few pages, its specificity is quite clear.

The book takes a different approach to weight loss. There are no diet plans and exercise routines. It contains 21 spiritual lessons to guide you in your journey. It was actually refreshing to read a weight loss book that focuses on the mental aspects rather than the physical. That’s not to say you can lose weight sitting on your rear end all day long.

The primary focus is twofold: learning to love yourself and your body, and readjusting your relationship with food. Those are noble goals and should be the first thing you do when wanting to lose weight. Changing your mindset is paramount before engaging in any type of diet or exercise program.

Marianne Williamson encourages digging into your past to unlock your bad relationship with your body and food. Through meditation, prayer and journal writing, you can retrain your thoughts and tap into what she calls your “Divine perfection.” This is the notion that, as creations of God, we are already perfect. It is our own thoughts and actions that moves us away from perfection.

I admire Marianne’s candor in talking about her own struggles with weight loss and the personal ordeals she went through in her childhood.

This is a good book to start for women who are having a hard time, mentally dealing with their bodies and struggling to lose weight. It can help them channel their thoughts and energy towards their goal, and then begin the physical process of diet and exercise.

When it comes to changing your life, it always starts with your mind.

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Age is Just a Number

Sep 25 2010 Published by ryanstaylor under Goals, Health and Fitness, Motivation, Success

Today is my 41st birthday. Do I feel 41? I don’t know. What are you supposed to feel? Old? Tired? I should hope not! Isn’t 40 the new 30 or something like that?

I will say that time is flying by, or at least it feels like it. The last 20 years have been a blur. Ask me to recall memories of the past 20 years and I’ll be hard pressed to come up with something on the spot. However, ask me about the 10 years prior and I’ll regale you with vivid stories of the glorious 1980s. It’s not that there were plenty of great memories in the last 20 years. Life’s been pretty damn good! There are always ups and down, but more ups than downs! It’s just that my teenage memories are much more vivid. I suppose that’s natural, or maybe it’s just me! What do you think?

The point is to forget about your age. Don’t let it depress you, it’s just a number. We’re all living longer and there’s so much to live for. Whether you’re sitting pretty or sitting in the dump, tomorrow can always be better. Better yet, right now can always be better! It’s up to you.

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Self Help Industry’s Perpetual Repackaging

May 05 2010 Published by ryanstaylor under Goals, Motivation, Success

I read and listen to a lot of self-help products. Pretty much all of them espouse the same thing. For all of the self-help literature on the market, there is a finite number of tried and true techniques that generate success. All of it starts and ends with your own volition. You can read every book and never be successful if all you do is sit on your ass all day visualizing being successful.

The self-help industry repackages the same techniques over and over. Some one repackages a 100 year-old book and turns it into a marketing phenomenon, i.e. The Secret. Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, and The Law of Success have been the basis for thousands of derivative self-help products. Just take an obscure self-help book and repackage it into a $300 audio course. Or you can do what some gurus did after the Secret phenomenon died down. They started critiquing the Secret! They said while the Secret was great, it didn’t tell you everything you needed to know. There were missing secrets!! These gurus will reveal the missing secrets of success in his new $200 DVD program. In the self-help world, there is always a new secret, a missing link to success, a newly discovered process that will guarantee riches. New product is required. Gurus can never rest on their previous product. They need new products to sell, new seminars, new cruises, and new retreats.

I’ve written about this before and I’m not knocking them for doing it. They are in the business of selling themselves primarily, and their products. They need their speaking gigs and their seminars because that is the primary income source. The books and products generate income, but are almost ancillary when it comes to speaking and seminars. Now coaching is all the rage. Nearly everyone has started a coaching program as it brings in subscription-type revenue, expensive subscription revenue! Still, it’s a business and these people need to maintain their image and lifestyle. They are selling success and they need to prove how successful they are. They perpetually repackage the same material in their books into more expensive seminars and coaching programs.

Success is relative. Gurus need to sell an image of wealth, health, happiness and vitality. Many of them are fantastic speakers. They are preeminent salesmen. Many of them got their start in sales and marketing. They put on a great show, then give you the hard sell at the end. That’s the part that always bothered me. The presenter may give you useful, actionable information during the seminar. But it’s not everything. For more money, you can get more secrets, more tips, more coaching, more, more, more!

Honestly, you can buy Napoleon Hill’s Law of Success book for $13 at Barnes and Noble and learn everything you need to know about success and never have to spend another dime or attend an expensive seminar or retreat. All you have to do is act on what you read.

Success does not come by visualization alone. That is just one step. You have to act on opportunities that come your way. You have to obtain the necessary desire to achieve your goals. You have to stop complaining and stop blaming. You have to just do it, to coin a phrase!

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The Bane of Up-Selling

Feb 06 2010 Published by ryanstaylor under Motivation, Success

News broke out on Wednesday, February 3, 2010 on the arrest of James Arthur Ray for three counts of manslaughter stemming from the October 2009 incident at Ray’s Spiritual Warrior retreat in Sedona, Arizona. Three people died during an intense 2-hour sweat lodge. This is like being in a sauna for two hours but in a more claustrophobic setting.

James Arthur Ray is the author of “Harmonic Wealth” and has appeared in the movie, The Secret. His Spiritual Warrior retreats cost upwards of $10,000 per person. My response to this matter is not on the criminal aspects or whether or not Ray is a fraud. That is up to the jury to decide. My response is on the self-help business model of up-selling.

Nearly every single self-help guru up-sells. It’s the business model of the industry. It usually starts with a book. The book purports to give you the secret of success. At the end of the book, there’s the first up-sell: learn even more secrets with the audio program. The up-sell continues with the DVD home study course. Then, if you really want to learn the “real” secret of success, you need to attend the seminars and retreats. So, from a book that costs $25, you can end up paying thousands of dollars to learn all of these secrets. Now there’s a trend to provide “coaching” services. I’ve posted my thoughts on coaching earlier. For a yearly or monthly fee, plus an initiation fee, you can have one of the guru’s associates–never the guru himself–act as a coach to help you achieve your goals. It’s just another up-sell.

It’s obvious the bottom line of the up-sell is to increase revenue. They can’t make enough money alone on book sales and speeches to have the lifestyle they sell you on. A big reason people spend thousands of dollars on these guys and gals is they want to the live the life of the guru. They want the big houses, fast cars, exotic vacations and all the trappings of wealth. If the guru isn’t living that lifestyle, then his customers will question his teachings. Image is everything in the self-help industry. A prime example of this is James Arthur Ray’s supposed difficulty in securing $500,000 cash to post bond after his arrest. If he is as rich as he claims, shouldn’t he be able to access $500K in cash? This also shows the propensity of many “wealthy” people to be asset rich and cash poor. For me, cash is always king.

I’m not totally condoning the up-sell, but it always has the slight stench of distrust. If you hold back what you know in your book because you want to sell me something more expensive, why should I trust you in the first place? Look, I don’t mind you selling me products that focus on a specific topic, i.e., finance, health, etc., but don’t tease me with a book that supposedly gives me the secrets of success, but not every secret you know. For that I’ll have to fork over some serious cash. It’s disingenuous and makes people skeptical of you.

Since I write about success, productivity, health and well-being, I run the risk of falling into this category. Let me reassure you that I do not up-sell. I write what I know and what works for me personally. I want to share what I know with you, dear reader. My upcoming book is everything I know and use personally to lead a happy life. I don’t need to up-sell you anything else. You can read my blog and my book and take with it what you want. There are no other secrets. It’s entirely up to you to become the success you want to be! And that is the real key! No amount of reading, listening or watching will make you a success until you get off your ass and take action. There really is no secret, it’s the best marketing ploy around. If you really want to be successful and live the life you dream of, you’ll do whatever it takes to get there. You don’t need a guru’s 3-day seminar at a cost of $4995 to be a success.

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Weight Loss Is Easy

Nov 22 2009 Published by ryanstaylor under Goals, Health and Fitness, Motivation

This post is a shortened version of a chapter in my forthcoming book. It’s about how easy it is for anyone to lose weight and get into great shape. It won’t cost a fortune and you won’t have to spend hours in the gym. Yes, I sound like a late-night infomercial but it’s true because I’ve been doing it for the past four months with great success.

Many people fail consistently at losing weight because deep down, they don’t want it badly enough. They try for a little bit, then come up with excuses to quit; or worse, they come up with excuses before they even try. They are not sufficiently motivated to finish. They may be afraid of actually succeeding. What would their spouse say? Their friends and family? You would think that they would encourage and compliment you as you lose weight and start looking good. But that is not always the case. Spouses may be afraid their man or woman becomes too good looking and would start becoming attractive to other people. Friends and even family members may become jealous of you as you become healthy and fit. They see you accomplishing your goal when they themselves are struggling to accomplish the same thing. If you are to accomplish your weight loss goal, or any other goal, you must ignore any external pressures from your friends and family. You have to be overtly motivated to achieve your goal or else you will fail every time.

Now, on to the actual program. It’s extremely simple. There are three steps:

1) Eat low-carb

2) Eat less

3) Move

That’s it! I follow an Atkins-style high-protein, low-carb diet that has worked wonders for me. I eat small-to-medium sized portions and I exercise every day. My exercise routine is free and simple. I walk 45-60 minutes every day, sometimes more because I enjoy it so much. I do a 10-15 minute body weight exercise based on Charles Atlas’s program.

I don’t have a scale at home so I don’t measure my success by weight. I measure by how my clothes fit. I’ve gone from wearing 40″ jeans that were a little tight, to 38″ jeans that require a belt in just under 4 months. I feel fantastic now. My goal is to comfortably wear a pair of 36″ jeans.

You must have patience when losing weight. Ignore all the ads proclaiming massive weight loss in a short time. That won’t happen. Weight loss is gradual. You’ll start noticing it after the first 2-3 weeks. Your clothes will feel a little loser. You’ll have more energy. You’ll feel better and more alive. This will motivate you more than ever to continue as you will actually see the results of your actions.

So what excuse is preventing you from starting? Get rid of the excuse and get going!

* – Naturally, I have to say this. Check with your doctor before starting any diet and exercise program. What works for me may not work for you.

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