With the sleep thing, my own feeling is that quality is far more important than quantity. I’d rather have a solid 3 hours than an 8 hour session of tossing and turning.

If you’re interested in the idea of afternoon napping, send me an email. As a biphasic sleeper I’ve done quite a bit of investigation.

Furthermore, he gets the ball rolling by starting his own shape up program to set the stage for others to follow.

I believe that 7 to 9 hours of sleep is best for most people.

I also agree with Rob that it’s best not to hibernate like a bear as it will be difficult to fit in the 5 to 6 small, balanced and healthy meals a day that keeps the metabolism fired up.

Here’s an excerpt on the topic of sleep that you may find educational from my No FAT Lies: The Absolute TRUTH on How to Lose Stubborn Fat for Life!

If you get 7 to 9 hours of sleep a day, for 6 days each week… you’ll feel more energized, alert and will improve your chances of maintaining a good mood (not saying that you’re usually in a bad mood since I personally don’t know you!).

Do you know that if you aren’t getting enough sleep on a regular basis that it can cause you to store more body fat? Yes, it’s true!

Recent studies have proved that a lack of sleep may cause you to have an increased appetite for food during the day, which can lead to overeating and new body fat to follow.

Additionally, sleep loss may elevate blood levels of glucose (a basic sugar that comes from the breakdown of carbohydrates).

Excess glucose promotes the overproduction of insulin (a hormone that carries glucose and other nutrients to organs, muscles and body fat storage compartments), which can promote the storage of fat, and can also lead to insulin resistance, a critical feature of adult-onset diabetes.

Not only that but a lack of sleep will also prolong any muscle soreness that you’ve encountered from weight training since your body regenerates itself during sleep.

Yours in great health,

Rich.

I think that after looking at socialized medicine I would lose weight also to help prevent me ever needing to actually depend on it. Look for the movies “Dead Meat” & “A crash course in brain surgery” on the net to show you the side of socialized medicine that Mr. Moore decided to leave out of his movie.

Mr. Moore movies are good for entertainment provided you don’t actually care about facts.

Not geared towards any one political view, Sicko shows us all what it’s like to be cared for in the various countries. Quite eye opening. You don’t even have to believe it.. but if you’re an American, I’m sure you’ve experienced some of it.

What’s interesting about the facts is that CNN put together a panel to challenge Mr Moore on his facts. They found that they could not challenge them, that in fact he was right on the money. The panel spent more time arguing about what facts were LEFT OUT of the movie rather than any issues around the facts that WERE in the film.

I like the comparison between the Brits and the US.

The British doctors make more money if they have their patients get well. They make more money in bonus’ if their patients lower their blood pressure, cholestrol and stop smoking, while the US doctors earn more money by denying health care.

One is about creating wellness in the society while the other is about making lots of money.

Every American should see this film. Here in Edmonton just the other day, the nurses took $1500 from their union funds and gave away tickets to anyone who wanted to go see the movie for free.

Everyone should see Sicko. Go see it tonight.

Cheers Michael. Best movie yet!

It is hardly news to point out that Michael Moore is a very talented filmmaker. Sicko only confirms this: Moore takes a potentially very dry subject like health care and makes it entertaining. Unfortunately, such a film in the hands of as skilled a propagandist as Moore is almost certain to mislead its audience. On that score, Sicko does not disappoint.

Having seen Sicko on Saturday, here are my thoughts in no particular order:

What I Liked: Moore does a big service by exploring the lengths to which health insurance companies will go to avoid paying for care, a serious problem in our system. Even though I suspect Moore has not given us the full story on some of the cases he examines, those cases are nevertheless heart wrenching and it is clear that insurance companies, especially health maintenance organizations (HMOs), treat some of their customers inhumanely.

From there, though, it’s all down hill. Moore diagnosis of the problem — the profit motive — is wrong. Within the next week I’m going to pen an article exclusively about profit and health care since it is an issue that is popular among the left. Suffice to say for now that many other insurance industries — homeowners, auto, life — also make a profit and there aren’t anywhere near the problems that there are in the health insurance industry. The difference is that there is far more government involvement in the health insurance industry, which often puts making a profit and providing good coverage at odds.

Is This Movie About Health Care Or…: At points in the film it seems that Moore is more interested in bashing America for not having as generous a welfare system as Europe’s than focusing on health care specifically. For example, he gushes about all of the great stuff that France has, such as free university education, free day care, government-mandated education, and government-mandated paid maternity leave. He interviews a middle-class woman with a new baby. Not only does France give her much longer maternity leave than we have in the U.S., the French government provides her with a nanny for up to four hours a day. She will, we are informed, help the mother cook dinner and, to Moore’s great delight, do her laundry for her. Do you suppose that the U.S. will become more or less anti-French when it becomes common knowledge that the government in France does their citizens’ laundry?

Moore continues in this vein with a rather odd interview with a British chap who suggests that the reason we don’t have such services in the U.S. is that the “ruling class” here keeps the people afraid of the government, and people who are afraid, especially the poor, don’t vote. If they did, the U.S. would have a far larger welfare state. Someone should tell Moore that indulging Chomsky-ite fantasies doesn’t make his movies any more credible.

The Contradictions: Also undermining Sicko’s credibility is the number of times Moore shoots himself in the foot. Some of it is small potatoes. For example, to mock Americans’ fear of socialized medicine, Moore points out that a number of our systems are socialized, such as our school system. But later, Moore chastises the state of our schools by pointing out that most public school graduates cannot find Great Britain on a map.

Other contradictions are more serious. Sicko indicts our system of private sector insurance by showing the ugly side of HMOs. Later, however, it notes that our system of HMOs is largely the result of Richard Nixon’s 1973 HMO Act. In other words, the growth of HMOs are not the natural outcome of private sector insurance but the spawn government policy. Nor does this instance of government bungling do much to bolster his case for a government takeover of our health care system.

Other contradictions are less glaring but no less serious. After condemning HMOs, Sicko laments the failure of Hillary Clinton to establish a system of universal health insurance in the U.S. during the early 1990s. But if HMOs are so bad, why would Moore be so sympathetic to HillaryCare? After all, Clinton’s plan was dubbed “managed competition” because it would have put Americans in one of a number of heavily regulated HMOs. However, Moore leaves that fact about HillaryCare out of Sicko, so perhaps that’s more a case of deception than a contradiction.

The Deceit: I sure hope Moore got paid by the governments of Canada, France, and the United Kingdom for the romantic way he portrays their health care systems. Moore plays a montage of American commentators claiming that the Canadian system has waiting lists for surgery. After his visit to Canada, Moore claims that “what we’ve been told about Canada is just not true.” But his “investigation” into the Canadian system involved chatting with some of his Canadian relatives, interviewing one man who had surgery on his elbow, and visiting a hospital emergency room. He did much the same for the United Kingdom. Clearly he didn’t spend much time looking for people who had spent time on waiting lists, although a bit of searching on the Internet would have been sufficient.

As for France, Moore spends all of his time interviewing people who seem to be largely drawn from France’s upper-middle class. No doubt the government services they receive are reasonably good. But one wonders if he might have found something different had he spent time in one of France’s Muslim ghettos. Nor did he spend any time looking at how the breakdown of France’s health care system contributed to the nearly 15,000 deaths from a heat wave in August 2003.

The Shameful: Moore should be ashamed of his decision to take ill and desperate Americans to Guantanamo and then Havana, Cuba. Showing Americans getting treatment at what was clearly a Potemkin hospital in Havana was despicable. Uncle Fidel must have been smiling as he recovers from the surgery that was initially botched by his Cuban doctors. If Moore had any decency, he would have compared the medical treatment that America gives the prisoners at Guantanamo with the treatment political prisoners in Castro’s gulags receive. One such prisoner, Guido Sigler Amaya, is in pretty bad shape:

Due to the inhumane prison conditions he is forced to endure Guido is suffering from more than ten serious illnesses: oral infection with bleeding sores on his gums and tongue, hypertension, renal and duodenal cysts, chronic gastritis and migraines, dilatation of the aorta, partial loss of vision, inflamed prostate, premature aging, excessive weight loss, difficulty in ambulation, dehydration, thrombosed hemorrhoids with one surgical intervention and more planned.

Alas, that would have undermined that Bash-America-First theme of Sicko.

Some conservatives are worried that Sicko will move us in the direction of socialized medicine. I doubt it. While Sicko may inform the health care debate in this country for the next month or so, it will probably have about as much impact on our health care system as Fahrenheit 9/11 had on the 2004 election — which is to say, not much. Through contacts in the film industry, conservative author Byron York discovered that Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 had outperformed expectations in “Blue America” areas like San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York City, but underperformed in “Red America” areas like the Midwest. Chances are, Moore’s new love affair with big government will suffer a similar fate. Furthermore, its timing leaves something to be desired, being released over a year before the next presidential election, when it might have had a much bigger effect.

Besides, with the exception of some folks on the left, most Americans probably realize by now that Moore is not really a documentary maker. He’s just a propagandist.

I hope that by viewing the movie, more Americans would get involved to propose a system that works better than what is working now.

I love all comments, views and opinions. Thank you Robert, for sharing yours.