Labor Day GAINZZZ, Baby!!!
Plus: MOVIEZZZ REVIEWZZZ

Diabetes (type 2) among the young has doubled in the past twenty years:

Rate of type 2 diabetes among young Americans has nearly DOUBLED since 2001 and type 1 diabetes has grown by 50%, study finds

The rate of type 2 diabetes among American kids aged ten to 19 has increased by 95% from 2001 to 2017, a new study finds

The rate of type 1 diabetes among the youth has grown by 45% over the same time period

Nearly 20% of American children have obesity, putting them at an increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes

The covid lockdowns seem to be worsening the situation:

American deaths from diabetes grew by 17% during the COVID-19 pandemic last year, according to a Reuters special report

...

Additionally, the estimated rate of youth under age 20 with type 1 diabetes grew by 45 percent.

The data highlights the endemic of obesity and unhealthy lifestyles the plague the United States, including the nation's children.

The Karens pushing the Endless Lockdowns say they're "following the science," but in fact they're bull-headedly ignoring it. Any intervention has negative side-effects, and some of the worst side-effects are being inflicted on children: obesity has spiked among young children during the endless lockdowns.

A new study found that child obesity significantly increased during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The study, published Friday on the Journal of the America Medical Association (JAMA) Network, found that "youths gained more weight during the COVID-19 pandemic than before it." The greatest change occurred among children aged 5 through 11 years old, which saw a Body Mass Index (BMI) increase of 1.57 and prevalence of obesity increase from 36.2% to 45.7%.

Some experts raised concerns when remote learning started that obesity would increase among children as they lacked certain daily physical activities, such as gym class and recess, as well as differences in meal plans. Now, those children have seen a significant increase in weight that will prove difficult to shed.

A study in May found similar results after researchers measured the BMI for about 300,000 children between the ages of 2 and 17: On average, the prevalence of obesity increased by about two percentage points, going as high as 15.4%.

"This isn’t just baby fat that’s going to go away," Brian Jessen, the lead author on the May study and a pediatrician, told The New York Times. "That's why I think this is so alarming."

Jason Fung, a nephrologist and diabetes specialist, has cured a lot of his patients with Type 2 diabetes by putting them on a low carb diet with some intermittent fasting.

His book The Obesity Code (his publisher chose the title for grabiness) is very good.

My GAINZZZ this week are limited: I started the push-up challenge (after blowing it off for a week), and found that my strength LOZZEZZZ were even worse than I expected them to be. I struggle to do 10 or 12 push-ups in a set. And by the fourth set, even later in the day, that falls further.

Obviously, then, I'm not up to 100 push-ups per day. I'm struggling to hit 40.

On the plus side, I am doing more push-ups than I started at. I did manage 70 one day.

Are any of you doing the push-up challenge?

And what about your GAINZZZ, generally?

Any BOOKZZZ or PROJECTZZZ?

Down in the NFL thread, some of us were talking about Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. It's my favorite recent movie.

On first viewing, it will feel very meandering and self-indulgent. The plot is not the usual one, where people are consciously working together towards some goal. That's how we usually feel the pace of a movie, knowing what the heroes have to do, and keeping track of what they've accomplished so far and what they have yet to accomplish.

In Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, what you'd call the main plot -- the major conflict with external forces -- is not being actively or consciously pursued by the main characters. They just stumble on to it, by chance. And they stumble on to it pretty late in the movie.

Now there are smaller, more internal character-arc plots going on -- Leonardo DiCaprio's character, 50s cowboy tv actor Rick Dalton, is feeling a midlife crisis as he realizes he's at the shitty, humiliating end of his career, for example -- but those don't feel like "big plots" so when you first see this, that kind of stuff is going to feel like meandering, or self-indulgence, or padding.

I gave up on this movie 45 minutes in, thinking it was another self-indulgent wankfast by autistic geek Quentin Tarantino. But my friend steve_in_hb, who sadly passed earlier this year, assured me it was really, really good.

So I watched it again and... I absolutely loved it. I loved it so much I watched it twice in one weekend, once on Friday night, then on Saturday afternoon after urging another friend to watch it.

The movie is a slow burn, though. Like I said, it's going to feel, for a long time, that no one is working on any major plotline... precisely because they're not working on a major plotline. They're just living their mundane (well, for actors) lives in 1969.

If you can get through the first hour, and accept that the entertainment in the first hour will be character backstory stuff and world-building about Hollywood in a very specific year (1969), then you'll enjoy the movie.

It really ends well. And it ends so well that all the stuff that seemed a little boring and meandering on first viewing turns out to be the stuff you really love on repeat viewings.

John Landis said that the good thing about making a grindhouse exploitation movie is that the producers didn't care what the hell you did -- so long as you delivered the exploitation. Whether the exploitation was of youth culture, or motorcycles, or bloody violence, or babes in bikinis, as long as you delivered that lurid, sensationalistic material, you could make the rest of the movie about anything.

You could attempt genuine art, if that was your kink.

I think that's the way to view Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: Tarantino delivered an exploitation movie about the Manson murders -- that's the grindhouse hook -- but it's not really about that. It's about two old friends from the prior age in Hollywood -- the age of cowboys and red-blooded manly men -- coming to terms that they're now out-of-fashion and out-of-work in hippie-ish, metrosexual 1969.

The exploitation is just in the movie so that he can get away with making the movie he really wants to make.

That said, the exploitation factor in this movie is really, really good. It's going to be what most people wind up talking about afterwards. At least until the third or fourth viewing, when the real movie -- the one about an actor and stuntman in the twilight of their short careers -- starts being the more compelling story.

I liked it so much that I immediately wanted to watch another period thriller movie, so I watched a movie a friend gave me, Bad Times at the El Royale, a movie I'd owned for a while but never felt like watching.

It's pretty good! Not a great movie like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but a fun, lively thriller.

If Once Upon a Time in Hollywood suffers from too little plot, Bad Times at the El Royale will be a good tonic for that -- it has lots of plot. It has all the plot.

The writer/director, I'm pretty sure, set a goal that he wanted a major revelation, reversal, or WTF moment every 12 minutes, and boy, did he hit that clock.

Even in the third act, the big climax, where you might think "well, there's not going to be any plot twists here" -- nope, he's got another big plot twist. A really good one, too.

What's the plot? Well, I think the idea for the film is this: "What if characters from five different crime/thriller/noir movies just happened to check into the same forlorn hotel on the same night, and then their movies got all screwed up crossing over with each other?"

This movie makes for a great companion movie with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood for two reasons:

1, It's set in the exact same time period as OUATIH -- 1969. In fact, there's a mass murder that occurs just days before the movie starts that is a fictionalized version of the Manson murders. And one character is an analog for Charles Manson. (The Manson family is a major plot element in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.)

2, It's regarded as sort of an attempt at a Tarantino homage or ripoff. Because of the contrivance of multiple storylines crossing over with each other -- violently -- people compared it to Pulp Fiction and, of course, Four Rooms. Critic Mark Kermode, in a positive review, nevertheless snarked that he heard people calling it "Bad Times at the Royale With Cheese."

I'd add a third similarity to OUATIH: The beginning is boring and self-indulgent and will make you want to turn it off!

But the beginning here is only 20 minutes instead of the 45 minutes or hone hour that OUATIH takes to get going. And when things start happening in Bad Times, they really start happening.

It's a good movie. It's a popcorn pleaser rather than a great one.

So I'd recommend that for a double feature. Be aware that OUATIH is about 2 hours 45 minutes long, and Bad Times is about 2 hours 20 minutes, so it'll be a long night of movies. But a good one.

Just give them both time and understand both are going to start off a bit damp.

(Oh, I was on such a mad jones for period thrillers that I rewatched The Nice Guys, set in 1976 or so, to make it a trilogy. Also a great movie. A really great movie. But I imagine most you know about that one.)

Do you guys have any MOVIEZZZ to recommend?

posted by Ace at 06:27 PM

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