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- A life ordinary by Amit Sarkar - Issue #36
A life ordinary by Amit Sarkar - Issue #36
Amit Sarkar
July 28, 2023
Welcome to another edition of my newsletter.
So I finally got my US tourist visa this week. The visa got approved by the next day and I was able to collect my passport shortly after that. One more new country visa is now added to my passport.
Also, my wife started a new 10-week fitness challenge with Fitbanker. It focuses on meal plans, training plans and mindset coaching. Her aim is to be the best version of herself by starting on this journey.
Tour De France got over and what an exciting event it was. Jonas Vingegaard won the Tour in spectacular fashion beating Tadej Pogačar. The greatest cycling event on the planet comes to an end. Time for me to go cycling and climb some local hills 😄.
And I have been loving the Morning Brew newsletter. Would encourage people to subscribe to it. It has got more news from the USA. But it still covers a lot from a global standpoint.
🥩 Fat loss
Have you ever wondered what happens to all the calories we burn during our exercise? Where does the fat go? Where do the carbohydrates go? Where does all the protein go? Where does all the fibre in our food go?
There are two things to consider here. Calories (kJ) relate to energy which has a different unit to the mass (kg) of the food that we eat. So how does food get converted to energy? And how does the food we eat go out of our body?
Actually, almost everything we eat comes back out via the lungs. Every carbohydrate you digest and nearly all the fats are converted to carbon dioxide and water. The same goes for alcohol.
Protein shares the same fate, except for the small part that turns into urea and other solids, which you excrete as urine.
The only thing in food that makes it to your colon undigested and intact is dietary fibre (think corn). Everything else you swallow is absorbed into your bloodstream and organs and, after that, it’s not going anywhere until you’ve vaporised it.
The reason we gain or lose weight is much less mysterious if we keep track of all the kilograms, too, not just those enigmatic kilojoules or calories.
According to the latest government figures, Americans consume 3.55 kg of food and beverages every day. Of that, 430 grams is solid macronutrients, 17 grams is fibre and the remaining 3.11 kg is water.
What’s not reported is that we inhale more than 660 grams worth of oxygen, too, and this figure is equally important for your waistline.
If you put 3.55 kg of food and water into your body, plus 660 grams of oxygen, then 4.2 kg of stuff needs to come back out, or you’ll gain weight. If you’re hoping to shed some weight, more than 4.1 kg will have to go.
The 430 grams of carbohydrates, fats, protein and alcohol most Americans eat every day will produce exactly 770 grams of carbon dioxide plus 290 grams of water (about one cup) and about 31 grams of urea and other solids excreted as urine.
An average 75kg person’s resting metabolic rate (the rate at which the body uses energy when the person isn’t moving) produces about 590 grams of carbon dioxide per day. No pill or potion you can buy will increase that figure, despite the bold claims you might have heard.
The good news is that you exhale 200 grams of carbon dioxide while you’re fast asleep every night, so you’ve already breathed out a quarter of your daily target before you even step out of bed.
I also stumbled upon this great video that talks about how weight disappears from our bodies.
In essence, the video summarizes the fat loss as follows. The energy that we see in the equation below is not be confused with fat loss as the units are different.
Our body loses fat as 84% Carbon Dioxide and 16% water.
So fat loss simply requires eating less, moving more and breathing regularly. Simple stoichiometry.
Stoichiometry is based on the law of conservation of mass. This states that, in a closed system (no outside forces), the mass of the products is the same as the mass of the reactants. Stoichiometry is used to balance reactions so that they obey this law. It is also used to calculate the mass of products and/or reactants.
🧭 Henley Passport Index
Having an Indian passport has its challenges and I have learnt to live and work around it while travelling to various countries.
Henley’s global passport ranking is the most comprehensive and useful guide to show which country has the most visa-free access to other countries.
The Henley Passport Index compares the visa-free access of 199 different passports to 227 travel destinations. If no visa is required, then a score with value = 1 is created for that passport. The same applies if you can obtain a visa on arrival, a visitor’s permit, or an electronic travel authority (ETA) when entering the destination.
Where a visa is required, or where a passport holder has to obtain a government-approved electronic visa (e-Visa) before departure, a score with value = 0 is assigned. This also applies if you need pre-departure government approval for a visa on arrival.
The total score for each passport is equal to the number of destinations for which no visa is required (value = 1).
Applying for visas is a big chore. But people from developed nations never realize how painful it is for people from developing nations to travel. This index shows the passport divide faced by a large number of people.
💥 Largest nuclear explosions
Even before I was born the world had been testing a large number of nuclear bombs, the first one being the Trinity test conducted in the USA, which has been recently featured in the film Oppenheimer. This was a landmark moment for mankind and paved the path for humanity’s race to gain control of the most powerful weapon on our planet.
The below article shows the largest explosions to date. Such is the power of the weapons that we have created, that it really is something we must all know.
The most powerful bomb that ever exploded on our planet was the Tsar Bomba. Crazy crazy crazy!!!
Tsar Bomba, also called Big Ivan, needed a specially designed plane because it was too heavy to carry on conventional aircraft. The bomb was attached to a giant parachute to give the plane time to fly away.
The explosion, yielding 50,000 kilotons, obliterated an abandoned village 34 miles (55km) away and generated a 5.0-5.25 magnitude earthquake in the surrounding region. Initially, it was designed as a 100,000 kiloton bomb, but its yield was cut to half its potential by the Soviet Union. Tsar Bomba’s mushroom cloud breached through the stratosphere to reach a height of over 37 miles (60km), roughly six times the flying height of commercial aircraft.
All nuclear explosions look something similar to the image below. A mushroom cloud.
These explosions show how careful we all must be since any insane person could use these weapons to destroy the world instantaneously.
❤️ Things I enjoyed
This section has been inspired by Ali Abdaal’s wonderful newsletter.
🎬 Video - Why Oppenheimer Deserves His Own Movie is something everyone can watch who is planning to or has already seen the Oppenheimer film.
📝 Article - 9 OUT-OF-THE-BOX ACTIVITIES TO TRY mentions some cool ideas. I am personally keen on trying Everesting. Time to find a mountain near my house 😄.
📱 App - ChatGPT now has its own Android & iOS app and I have been using the Android app lately. It makes accessing ChatGPT so much easier and also gives quick responses while you are on the go.
🎬 Video - OPPENHEIMER 70MM IMAX film print assembly at Science Museum, London shows the huge film print being assembled before it is shown to the audience. An interesting insight into the world of projectionists.
📺 TV show - Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire is a sci-fi anthology series presenting futuristic visions from Africa. Just finished watching episode 1 and will watch the rest soon.
Thank you so much once again for reading my newsletter this week. Please feel free to Buy me a coffee if you are enjoying what I am sharing.
If you want to follow me around the internet, then please do so here.
Until we meet again next week, hydrate, exercise, eat nutritious food and read some amazing books.
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