Blog of Bermanism

Ah, the holidays. A time filled with love and giving, multi-million dollar advertising campaigns and extortion, and eating until your round little belly splits up the sides spilling out that last bit of eggnog you just couldn’t go without. Yes, the holiday cheer is definitely in the air, and there isn’t a damn thing I can do about it.

Seriously though, the holidays are a weird time of year for me. Being Jewish, I don’t celebrate Christmas in any way, and, being an American Jew, Christmas is shoved in my face on a regular basis from a few weeks before Thanksgiving until after New Year’s. The season is shoved in my face both figuratively and literally, the latter in the form of countless holiday parties that are put on by the dozen or so people/organizations that you spend most of your time with. The main attraction at these holiday parties is, of course, food. Massive quantities of food, and not the kind of food that is good and healthy for you; comfort foods filled to the brim with fats, sugars, triglycerides, alcohols and anything else not good for you. To date, since the onset of the holiday season, I’ve now attended about six holiday parties, each one with a literal ton of food and alcohol. So, I, being who I am (and doing everything the hard way), decided to start a diet during this season of shopping mania, the draining of bank accounts like no other time of year, and the stuffing your face with the passion of a feral pig. That’s right folks, Ari is on a diet!! Ok, before any of you say that I’m not fat, I know that I’m not fat. The reason I went on the diet was to reach a more ideal weight for rowing. See, I’m about 8 inches shorter than the rest of my rowing team, and since most of rowing happens with the legs, I have a severe mechanical disadvantage when trying to compete with other members of my team for positions in boats. So, I have to make up for my lack of height by training my ass off, by having the best technique that I can, and by having an ideal power to weight ratio. The lighter I am and the stronger I am, the more effective I am in the boat because I won’t weigh it down as much. I rowed this entire season at 180lbs. When I rowed in college, I was 153lbs, which is lightweight. For masters rowing, winter lightweight is 165 and spring is 160. If I can keep my current strength and lose 15-20 lbs, my adjusted strength will be right about where everyone else is in my boats, which means that I would make it go faster, which is a good thing.

So, that is the reason for the diet (plus, I just really want to look good in a swimsuit). Surprisingly, the diet hasn’t been that difficult for me. I’ve just been much more conscious of what and how much I’m eating and adjusting my intake when I work out more or less. I haven’t felt that hungry and I have had much more energy than usual. This has been a very good thing, and I’m excited to finally lose my belly. As of this morning, I am 169lbs from a starting weight of 179lbs. I’ve lost 10lbs in three weeks!! While that kind of weight loss doesn’t hold a candle to the loss seen on The Biggest Loser, it is still a loss 5.6% of my starting weight, that’s 1/20 of myself. So, I’m very proud and very happy. It will be interesting to see if I can hang on to the diet and weight loss while my parents are in town over the week. We’re likely to go out to dinner a lot at the many delicious establishments in San Francisco. As long as I don’t gain any back, I’ll be happy. If I can hold my weight here and then pick it up again after the 1st, that will be perfect. I’ve got a few more days until they arrive, so I’ll see if I can get to 167 by then.

For those that don’t know, I weighed 210lbs at my heaviest in grad school. Picking up competitive rowing again definitely helped out with a lot of the initial weight loss. I was 185 when I moved to California. Then, as a product of living in San Francisco (which is generally healthier than most other places), and by stepping up my training at my new rowing club, I lost an additional five pounds without even thinking about it. To date, over the last two years, I have lost 41lbs (19.5%). The most interesting side-effect of losing the weight (and growing my hair longer) has been that I apparently look a lot younger than I did before. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been carded at every alcohol purchase followed by a look of shock when they realize that I’m 32. When I tell them that I’m also a doctor, they nearly faint. It is really interesting. This must be what my father experiences on a regular basis. He’s stuck in a time-dilation field of some sort because he always looks 20 years younger than he is. Hopefully, I inherited that aspect of his physiology (as long as I take care of myself).

So, that is my tale of dieting during the holiday season. I will say that it takes an enormous amount of self-restraint to lose weight during this time of year, but the rewards are well worth it, and I won’t need to make some half-hearted new year’s resolution about losing the holiday poundage. So, Happy Holidays to all. May you find an extra $1,000 between the cushions on your couch and may the recipients of your hard-fought gifts be pleased with how you spent your third quarter earnings.

It has been a very busy several months for me and I have not written about any of it for a long time. Mainly because I’ve been too busy, but also because I’ve been a little lazy. I’m working full time, being the webmaster for the Austin Rowing Club, developing an online payment system for the Marin Rowing Association, and trying to have some sort of a social life, which is failing miserably, hence the lack of posting to this blog recently (once I found out that people occasionally read it). So, since I have a lot of things to write about, I’ve decided to break it into chapters, or else I’ll be writing a mini-novel in one post. This chapter is about the Society for Neuroscience Annual Conference 2006 in Atlanta, GA. This was only the second Neuroscience that I had been to, the first was in New Orleans (pre-Katrina) and I managed to get a postdoc out of that meeting.

My main impression of the Neuroscience meetings is that they are crazy busy. There are usually around 30,000 scientists at these things, and all of them are trying to present their little niche in the universe of brain research. In all honesty, the meeting represents all of the brain research going on in the world. It is a lot to take in. One week of endless and abundant information. If you happen to be like me and are interested in everything, then this meeting can get a little overwhelming. Even if you are just trying to stick to your topic of research, it can be a lot. Navigating the maze of posters, trying to decide which talks to go see, and still trying to go out at night and have a good time with your friends; it can be a daunting task for sure. This year, since I didn’t have to present a poster, I decided to focus on my very limited and narrow fields of Parkinson’s Disease and Alzheimer’s disease, with just a touch of glutamate transport *sarcasm* (except that I just couldn’t help checking out the brain/machine interface sections, which were way cool). It was insane!! There were at least 100 posters at every session that was trying to see. Sometimes, there were two or three different topics for each of my fields, not to mention that I was trying to go to talks in between all of the poster sessions. After the first day, I decided that I would get more out of posters than going to the 15 minute talks, so I abandoned every talk except the keynote speakers and featured talks. This made my days much more manageable. Armed with my digital camera (so that I could take pictures of posters), a pen, my palm pilot and a notebook, I went to town. I caught up on 10 years of research that I’ve been meaning to read about during my “downtime” in the lab. It was really, really great. I was able to get a lot of ideas for directions to take my own research, and I was able to learn a lot of the history of the work in my field (not to mention, I got to meet a lot of really great researchers who are all doing extremely interesting work). I collected a lot of information and realized that I knew more about Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and glutamate transport than I thought I did, which was reassuring as I delve into this very complicated and well established field.

The keynote speaker at Neuroscience 2006 was a real treat. Frank Gehry, the renowned architect behind the Guggenheim Bilbao museum in Spain, spoke to us about the creative process and the way he lets his brain do the creative work until the design just feels right. His magnificent talk about all of his great works from the Guggenheim to the Disney theater in LA was punctuated by a one-on-one interview with Rusty Gage, former president of the Society for Neuroscience. The interview really brought together many of the aspects of the field of neuroscience with the designs and foresight that Frank Gehry brought to the table. It was fascinating, and a really nice way to start of the meeting.

One of the main points that I took home from the meeting regarding neurodegenerative diseases, is that the blood brain barrier may play a much more significant role in the development of these diseases than we originally thought. All along, we’ve been looking at various cell types that appear to contribute to disease, namely microglia (the brain’s immune cells) and astrocytes (the brain’s support cells) and the fact that over activation of these cell types can disrupt or destroy neurons when they are not supposed to. There is mounting evidence that with the development of neurological insult in the form of anything from stroke to the accumulation of amyloid-beta plaques in Alzheimer’s, the blood brain barrier may fail due to a severe inflammation response by both microglia and astrocytes. Astrocytes maintain the brain side of the blood brain barrier. If they are somehow misfunctioning, then they may be responsible for the breakdown of the barrier. Upon this breakdown, it appears that circulating macrophages enter into the brain. Once this happens, macrophages become indistinguishable from microglia, but they are likely much more virulent since they haven’t had a lifetime to adapt to the delicate environment in the brain. It could be that these infiltrating machrophages cause way more damage to the brain than the resident cell might do alone. Anyway, the whole field is moving to understand these systems more because they may play a major role in the progression of diseases like these.

So, this year’s Neuroscience was a great meeting and I really enjoyed it. I think I’m one of the few people who actually enjoys the insanity that surrounds a meeting of this size. I find it is a wonderful opportunity and I can’t wait until next year, when I can actually show off some of my work and get feedback from the entire community about it.

Although the meeting itself was awesome, I can’t say the same about Atlanta. We stayed downtown at the Sheraton. There just wasn’t much to do there, and you couldn’t walk five feet without some street person trying to hustle you for money, and they were well practiced! They would offer to give you directions, tell you where the hot spots in town were, and then politely offer to take all of your money. It got really annoying. Plus, there were only a few bars within walking distance downtown. There were a lot of restaurants and the Olympic part was pretty cool. But, aside from the city being a little lame, it was great to hang out with new and old friends. It was so nice to see people from Austin, and to get to know people that I didn’t know as well from Austin before. I really had fun with everyone. I’m guessing that the meeting in San Diego next year will be much more fun.

Well, that is the story from Neuroscience 2006. The next chapter will outline the comparatively boring events from the two weeks following Neuroscience in which my life was summarily sucked up by behavioral testing. More to come soon, hopefully. Peace, Love, and Bananas.