Newsweek had a nice writeup about obesity and consumption of processed grains that pairs well with this story.

she arrived in New York in 1934 and was "startled" by the number of fat kids she saw - "really fat ones, not only in clinics, but on the streets and subways, and in schools." What makes Bruch's story relevant to the obesity problem today is that this was New York in the worst year of the Great Depression, an era of bread lines and soup kitchens, when 6 in 10 Americans were living in poverty. The conventional wisdom these days - promoted by government, obesity researchers, physicians, and probably your personal trainer as well - is that we get fat because we have too much to eat and not enough reasons to be physically active. But then why were the PC- and Big Mac - deprived Depression-era kids fat? How can we blame the obesity epidemic on gluttony and sloth if we easily find epidemics of obesity throughout the past century in populations that barely had food to survive and had to work hard to earn it?

From my personal experience, I recently lost a lot of weight. The biggest shift I made to burn off fat was to drastically reduce how much grain I consumed weekly. I exercised about the same amount during the time, but the weight loss tracked pretty closely to my change in diet.

For about 5 years, I have had a goal to become fit. I'm still in my 20's, and didn't want to hit 30 with my beer gut intact. At first I tried the Hacker's Diet, which boils down to calorie counting and exercise. While I did lose weight from calorie restriction, I was always hungry and not really fit. And the weight came back pretty quick. I then found out about Crossfit, and did that on and off for a couple years, really enjoying the Olympic lifting part of it (despite never being athletic before), but I didn't get much out of it until a year ago, due in part to my lack of commitment to it. In the past year, I burned off 60 lbs of fat, and added 10 lbs of lean muscle mass. While Crossfit has been a huge help, it didn't kick in to high gear until I stopped eating so much grain, be it cereal, bread, pizza dough, etc. It was surprising how much of my diet was based on starches, which are just sugars without the fiber you find in fruit. At the same time, I stopped caring about calorie counting, and just focused on eating better, and eating whenever I was hungry. I still eat grain, and drink my fair share of beer (I'm a homebrewer, so I don't think I can ever give it up), but significantly dropping how much grain I eat per week has been HUGE to burning off fat. Thishttp://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/05/06/why-the-campaign-to-stop-america-s-obesity-crisis-keeps-failing.html article appeared in Newsweek, focusing on the obesity epidemic, and processed grain diets. It's interesting reading. I know personal experience is anecdotal, but after a year of some exercise, I weigh in at 155, and got my first muscle up this past Tuesday.

Completely Off topic (mod me down), but I've been looking into getting into metal smithing and forging, and would love to pick your brain about it. There is a forge near me, outside of Boston that offers a bunch of intro classes. Replying because I can't find a way to PM you.

Barcade in Brooklyn is a live and well. Sure, it's 21 plus, but it's clean, and the beer is decent.

As noted in other comments, HTML is ignoring the second space, and Slashdot does not support &nbsp.

I believe they disabled the use of 3rd party memory cards. I say this, because I have a USB HDD plugged into my 360 for the purpose of watching movies and TV shows. The Media Player on the 360 recognizes the drive just fine, and reads the video files without issue.

I would prefer to stream them across the network, but I got really frustrated with the XP and XP Media Center setup that MS required. It never worked well, and TVersity never really worked the way I wanted it to either. It's an ok solution, but I find a USB HDD to be a better one.