I Miss Ardis

I Miss Geoff and Kristen and Jeff and Jacob and Blake

I Miss Eric and Jonathan and Ben and Justin and Kevin and Julie

I Miss blogging

I am researching ChatGPT for work and am trying a variety of different things. Occasionally, I ask ChatGPT a question related to church.

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I was asked to give a talk at church this week. Here is what I have planned. Feedback welcome:

[potentially add icebreaker for time]

Hello, My name is Matt W., I’m here today with my wife, and two of our daughters. Our oldest is away at College. I’ll forgo a deeper introduction because today I was asked to speak on “How the restoration of the gospel has affected or changed my life?” which will require me to talk about my life to some degree. To speak on this topic, I need to cover at least 3 things. “The Gospel”, “The Restoration”, and “The Impact on my Life”. I’ll start with The Gospel: 

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In a recent ward conference, a local church leader made the claim that David Bednar told him the children’s songbook is full of false doctrine. This surprised me. I know there is the classic complaint from Neal A. Maxwell that “Give said the Little Stream” was “not exactly theologically drenched”, but being simple and being false are two different claims.

Is this common sentiment? Have you heard this? What Songs do you think this is pointing to?

A Trowel is a small handheld tool with a flat pointed blade, used to apply and spread mortar or plaster.

A Musket is an infantryman’s light gun with a long barrel, typically smooth-bored, muzzle-loading, and fired from the shoulder.

Both are very difficult, if not impossible, to use one-handed.
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Hey y’all. I’m back.

Or I guess I’m still here…

As you know, blogs are lame now. Or something like that. Anyhow I’ve spent most of the last decade diverting myself at my BYU sports Twitter account (@geoffjbyu). But I still maintain the ol’ blog so I figured I’d slap up some thoughts on the latest turbulence surrounding Elder Holland’s speech at BYU a couple of days ago since this topic doesn’t really work there. Read or listen to Elder Holland’s talk here.

Based on some reactions I saw online, liberal Mormons (er, church members?) are severely disappointed in all sorts of things about the talk. They don’t like that it feels like a smackdown to them and LGBTQ BYU students in general. They don’t like how he quotes the “trowel and musket” analogy from church history and a previous Elder Oaks talk for fear it will inspire looney right wingers to violence. And they don’t like that he seemingly threw that BYU valedictorian who came out in his graduation speech under the bus, even though the speech was approved by BYU.

On the other side, there is evidence that the Mormon alt-right wackos are indeed doing some victory laps and using the musket talk somewhat menacingly online. This “DezNat” wannabe secret combination of Mormon alt-righters is a scourge. Anything that revs those turds up concerns me.

Anyhow, I don’t want to get into the nitty gritty of the talk. I think, based on the freaking out some folks are doing, it’s safe to say that Elder Holland probably didn’t quite hit the mark he was aiming at though.

In this post I more want to step back and suggest a few ways BYU and the church might handle this LGBTQ issue in the future.

1: Move on from the gay marriage fight

It’s over. Gay marriage is legal. Accept that fact and move on. It’s the law of the land now and the church won’t change that.

2: Focus on the Law of Chastity only

In the end this is about the Law of Chastity. And by that, I mean the church teaches that any sexual behavior outside of a legal hetero marriage is a sin. It’s 100% within a church’s rights to believe and teach that. So stick to it. You’re gay? Fine, live the Law of Chastity as we teach it and there’s no problem with the church. You’re Bisexual? Fine — same. Making discussions and arguments about sexual identity is always going to be a losing battle. Focus on the behavioral standard and at least you can be consistent.

3: Because of the Law of Chastity, be ok with a permanent truce

The LGBTQ community will likely never be satisfied with the church until the Law of Chastity changes and gay sex (within marriage at least) is considered chaste. And it’s unlikely the Law of Chastity as I’ve described it will change. So at best the church will likely have to settle for a truce. Say and mean that we don’t focus on whatever sexual identity people claim. Say and mean that to be in good standing with the church (or with BYU) folks of any sexual identity just need to live the Law of Chastity. The church would benefit from having strict standards when it comes to sexual *behavior* and keeping the focus on that, rather than wading into the weeds of sexual identity.

Of course this gets messy because they’d have to determine what qualifies as sexual behavior. Does holding hands count? Snuggling? Kissing? What about just being transgender? There would have to be allowances for these things to be consistent. The church and its members would need to give ground on many of these things over time, but would not have to give ground on strictly adhering to the Law of Chastity.

4: Start reacting to violations of the Law of Chastity more consistently

Breaking the Law of Chastity is breaking the Law of Chastity. Seems to me that we will need to get to the point where the ecclesiastical reaction to Bryce and Breanna having sex outside of marriage is equal to the reaction to Bryce and Dallin having sex. If and when the Law of Chastity becomes the standard we are focusing on regarding this issue, we can’t wink at hetero indiscretions and freak out about gay indiscretions among members or BYU students. This one is gonna take some cultural training but I think it is required if we really aren’t going to be bigoted. The standard has to be “no sexual behavior outside of a legal hetero marriage” period. The breaking of that standard would need be equally and fairly dealt with when it comes to church discipline (and BYU discipline).

If #4 makes you uncomfortable then perhaps it’s time to ask yourself why hetero breaking of the law of chastity is more “ok” than gay breaking of it. It’s not. Or at least reason dictates it shouldn’t be.

Anyhow, that’s what I got for you today. Is it controversial? I hope not. Doesn’t seem like it should be. I think I’m just trying to be pragmatic and fair. But let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

(I know this is a heated topic for many, but please try not to be obnoxious in the comments — I’ll be moderating the comment section to keep things productive. Thanks!)

A short one today:

A brief summary of

Moller, Stephanie, et al. “Determinants of Relative Poverty in Advanced Capitalist Democracies.” American Sociological Review, vol. 68, no. 1, 2003, pp. 22–51. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3088901. Accessed 10 May 2020.

This article reviews the development of a data set to measure the impact of multiple different variables on poverty and proverty reduction efforts. It does this by devising a means to measure poverty with and without “tax and transfer” (ie government intervention via wealth redistribution). It tests 17 different variables which had been hypothesized to be indicative of poverty rates across 14 different countries with different rates of poverty to determine which factors had the greatest impact of causing poverty and which factors had the greatest impact on reducing poverty. (more…)

Single Parent Families with Children under 18 have a markedly higher rate of poverty. 26.6% of single parent families (41.4 % in the US (, 2nd only to Ireland’s 45.8%) are below the relative poverty line. This is 3.5X the rate of dual parent or childless homes (which are similar, 7.6% and 8.9% below the poverty line). The number one cause of single parent families is still Separation or Divorce, followed by unwed pregnancy. (56% of childless homes from divorce per pew research for the US, and more dramatic in other nations like Japan, with 96%+ from divorce). While there are some indications that unwed single parents are financially worse off (30% of median 2 parent income vs 49% for divorced), there isn’t a good source I have yet found which breaks out single parents in poverty by these two cohorts and by the definition of relative poverty in the prior post, both would be below the relative poverty line. (more…)

Jeffrey Holland at one point said, speaking of the current pandemic: “We pray for those who have lost loved ones in this modern plague, as well as for those currently infected or at risk. We certainly pray for those who are giving such magnificent healthcare. When we have conquered it—and we will—may we be equally committed to freeing the world from the virus of hunger and freeing neighborhoods and nations from the virus of poverty. May we hope for schools where students are taught—not terrified they will be shot—and for the gift of personal dignity for every child of God, unmarred by any form of racial, ethnic, or religious prejudice.”

This is an amazing call to action from an Apostle of Jesus Christ: to end hunger, end poverty, increase education, increase safety, and end prejudice.

It’s also really big and complicated, and there are a lot of opinions about what does and does not work in this space. Many of these items are inter-related and have causal relationships one with another. Hunger is caused by Poverty. Poverty is impacted by lack of education, education is impacted by prejudice.

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In the first installment of this series I talked about how the first step I took to getting into better shape and cutting body fat was to start counting calories. That works. The problem is that if you do it wrong you’ll consistently be hungry and no one wants to live the rest of their lives feeling hungry. The persistent hunger is largely why my previous calorie counting forays worked for a while but ended up not lasting. Basically the normal pattern was I’d injure myself somehow, stop exercising, and with the extra calorie-burn from exercise gone from my counting equation I’d give up and stop counting calories since it was too easy to get into a calorie surplus daily with no exercise anyway. Then I’d go back to that 185-195 lb range I had drifted into over the years. Like I said, at just over 6’0″ I was never all that fat, I was just a bit… what’s the right word… Squishy? Flabby? Soft? (And for the record, the BMI scale indicates I am “overweight” at anything over 185 lbs. I know BMI gets a bad rap, but the fact is that most of us would benefit from believing it.)

Anyhow, I believe that trying time-restricted eating was a key ingredient this time to help the calorie counting stick and to me getting much better results this time around. More on that below.

Various Fasting Protocols

First of all, we Latter-day Saints know a bit about fasting. Most of us have been fasting at least once per month since we were wee Mormons. Turns out there are all sorts of ways one can fast, including the standard 20-24 hour no food or drink method I grew up with in the church. Here are some variations that get lumped under “fasting” when it comes to health.

1. Straight fasting

A little studying revealed to me that as long as you keep your sodium levels up (for electrolytes) and a few other things like magnesium and potassium you can fast (with water) for many days at a time. Our bodies are pretty good at keepin’ on it seems. I haven’t tried a long fast but I do fire up an occasional 24-48 hour fast now that I’ve been sold on some of the benefits of fasting, not the least of which is autophagy. It’s not always comfortable but the reported benefits make it worth trying I think.

2. Time-restricted eating

This is probably the most popular method of “intermittent fasting” these days. It basically means you do all of your eating for the day in a specified window of time. Probably the most popular version of this is an 8 hour feeding window per day with no calories the rest of the day. So for instance, maybe you skip early breakfast and do all of your eating for the day between 10:00 AM and 6:00 PM. Or maybe you go from Noon to 8:00 PM. Or maybe 6:00 AM to 2:00 PM works best. The hours you choose don’t matter much — the key is no calories outside of that eating window. Many folks will take this a step further and cut the feeding window to 6, 4, or 2 hours per day. With the One Meal A Day (OMAD) method having lots of champions — especially for when trying to cut fat.

The reported benefits of this kind of fasting are myriad. Just do a search on the term “intermittent fasting” in a search engine or YouTube and hundreds of results will pop up. But here are the things I personally like best about it:

A. I just get less hungry. Especially now that my body has adapted to the eating window. I get hungry basically at 10:00 AM every morning because that’s when I normally start eating every day. Other than that I might have some mild hunger in evenings or just before 9:00 AM but it’s just that — mild.

B. When I do get hungry I know it will pass and knowing when I’m eating next makes getting past any hunger waves way easier.

C. It’s not that easy to massively overeat in a shorter feeding window. I mean you can do it — but it’s much harder than it is when you are grazing from 7:00 AM to 11:00 PM.

D. My migraines have gone away. I don’t know which of the magical aspects of fasting made this happen but the migraines I used to have to stave off with Excedrin once or twice a week have basically gone away. Love that part.

E. I haven’t had the bouts of melancholy/depression this year that used to come on for a month or so at a time. I just feel better.

I want to note that while I keep my eating window pretty similar most days, I am flexible about it. For instance if I know I am going out to a restaurant that night I’ll usually just hold off longer before I start eating that day. Or some days, like holidays, I’ll just scrap the eating window and pick things up again the next day. I don’t recommend being fanatically strict about the hours. The goal is to find something that is sustainable and fanatical hour watching is not sustainable long term.

3. Quasi-fasting (calorie restriction on certain days)

One form of “intermittent fasting” has people restricting calories to 400-600 per day periodically. I blogged about this some years ago. Some people do this every other day, some recommend it once or twice per week. I tried this back in 2013 and my problem with this approach was I got ravenously hungry when I tried it. In retrospect it was probably from trying to spread the 600 calories out throughout the day (thus never really entering a “fasted state”). Plus for my 600 calories I was eating too many carbs which spiked my insulin and made me way hungrier by the afternoon. If I were to do this again I’d just treat it as an OMAD day with low calories and would probably go straight protein and fat on the 600 calories to avoid insulin spikes. That would make it more of a real fast anyway.

I’ve learned fasting ain’t for everyone

The time-restricted version of fasting in conjunction with calorie counting has worked wonders for me. I’m back to my wedding weight and KJ and I got married back in 1992. But it doesn’t work for everyone. KJ tried time-restricted eating and hated it. Her hunger would get ravenous — especially late at night and it would interfere with sleep for her, which was already an issue. In the next installment I’ll talk about the approach that has worked wonders for her: The Keto Diet.

So I’ve cut like 30 pounds of fat this year. I figured I’d blog about it.

First, the basics: I’m just over 6 feet tall, turned 48 this year, and at the start of the year I was up to 196 pounds. No one considered me fat, but I was sporting a fairly standard 21st century middle-aged-man dad bod. I was convinced that if I could get down to 180 pounds I’d have super low body fat. Turns out, I had WAY more body fat on me than that. But more on that later.

Phase One — Calorie Counting:

First thing I did was I started counting calories in and calories out. Don’t let anyone tell you that doesn’t work — it does. I like to build me a good spreadsheet so I determined that the number of calories it took me to maintain my weight (at the time) was probably about 1800 per day (assuming basically no exercise). This is generally referred to as basal metabolic rate or BMR. You can easily get an estimate for your BMR by googling some online calculators.

So I started recording how many calories I consumed daily. Then when I exercised I’d subtract the extra calories I thought I’d burned from that. For instance, I roughly assumed I burned about 100 calories per mile of walking (again based on basic internet research) so if I went on a three mile walk I’d subtract 300 calories. The cardio machines at the gym give you a calories burned number so that’s easy. And I basically assumed an hour of weight lifting is about 500 calories. You get the gist. My goal wasn’t to be exact because that’s not feasible, but I didn’t want to cheat because that defeats the purpose.

Every day I’d tally things up. If I consumed 1500 calories but lifted weights for any hour at -500 that would be 1000 net calories that day. The assumption I use, again from internet research, was that -3500 calories was roughly one pound of fat. So my initial goal was to get to -35,000 calories which would mean I cut 10 pounds of fat.

Side note: Having tried this on and off in years past I discovered that my biggest problem was under-counting calories. So to offset that, I set my BRM number at 1500 rather than 1800. I figured that would balance out my persistent under-counting problem and it has proved to be effective.

Solid Early Returns

I went at it pretty hard that first month or so, and sure enough, it worked. I was consuming an average of about 1300 calories per day and burning off an average of about 700 per day, putting me at a net of just 600 per day. In less than forty days I was at my -35,000 calories goal. And sure enough, I was tipping the scales at just 184 — 12 pounds lower than when I started. Success! Plus I was actually slowly getting stronger by hitting the weights maybe 2-3 times per week.

I kept on for a few more weeks and pounds kept coming off. By day 50 I was down to 181 pounds and feeling pretty stoked about it. Then came the work trip to New Orleans and I encountered my first hiccup. More on that next post.

But for now I’ll just say counting calories works like a charm for me. At least to lose weight at first. My spreadsheet is crucial to it all though. I’m already in front of my computer all day for work so having that spreadsheet there all the time helps when it comes to recording the calories in and out. Plus I have made a nifty little graph that makes it all super visual and motivating for me.

Counting Calories In

In order to count calories in I ended up eating a ton of frozen foods that first couple of months. I liked the food well enough, it’s mostly easy to microwave, and the exact calorie count is easy to see with those. Same with canned food. For other foods you often have to just google the stuff you’re eating. Occasionally I’d even weigh some stuff but I’m too lazy to do that much. After a while you kind of get a hang of figuring out how many calories you’re taking in. If you cheat the scale (and the tightness of your waistband) won’t lie.

I do a lot less frozen foods now, as I’ll explain later, but those easily calorie-countable items are still useful as part of my program.

What Next?

In follow up posts I’ll go over what I did when I got off track, my experiences with intermittent fasting (aka time-restricted eating), the ketogenic diet, creatine, weight training vs cardio, and more. Stay tuned.

But of course, chime in on the topic in the comments here. I’ve been away from my blog for years so we can make it like old times!