PoundCounter

Presented without comment.

Source = ZeroHedge

And an excellent video along the same lines that exlains what is truly happening in the financial world:

Punk Economics - Lesson 3

I've chosen an image by Escher for today's post because I hope it will provide you with a different way of looking at something, namely inflation.

Inflation is most often defined as the rise in price of goods and services over time. However, its less often quoted meaning is the loss of value of the currency. It's this second meaning that is more representative of what inflation truly is. I strongly believe the first definition is misleading, perhaps deliberately so, as we shall see.

We have become so accustomed to living in a society that uses money that we often take its units of measurement, be they Pounds, Dollars or Euros, as fixed, much like distances like metres and weights like kilograms. In reality, they are units of exchange and are thus subject to the laws of supply and demand.

Think back to a time before money. Perhaps a wheat farmer wanted some meat for his meal. He might exchange a bushel of wheat in the local town for a pig. One year, pork is particularly po…

I've started the process of losing the fat I inevitably gained from eating a slight calorie surplus for the past 10 months during my muscle and strength-building phase. I now need to make sure that the food I'm choosing to eat is as satiating as possible. Losing fat depends on a number of factors, the most important I believe to be time, willpower and calorie intake. Unless you are very overweight, you don't want to lose weight too fast because you will also be losing the good things like muscle and potentially interfering with hormones, which lead to feeling like crap. In your head, you want to be lean now, but your body is going to fight that and if you go too quickly, you'll end up falling off the waggon too soon and never making much progress. Changing your body is about time and patience. It's a marathon, not a sprint.

I'm aiming for a loss of 1 lb per week and to do this, I'm going to taper my calories down each week to ensure that I maintain this ra…

Since the mid 1990s, the UK has "enjoyed" substantial growth in the UK residential housing market. I say "enjoyed" because increasing house prices are a double-edged sword - they benefit those who are smart (lucky?) enough to get out at the top and hurt those who get locked in to a property worth less than the loan secured on it. I've written before on one of the factors affecting the market - the number of buyers, i.e. the demographics. Now I'm going to put my money where my mouth is and make a prediction for where prices are headed.
First, I need to point out the importance of real prices vs. nominal prices. Essentially, real prices are corrected for inflation and nominal prices are not. When discussing prices of anything over a reasonably long time period (5 years or more), it's important to use the real price because even a small amount of inflation can make large impacts to the value over time. This is due to the nature of exponential growth and I…

I've been away (from this blog) for far too long. My health routine is largely unchanged but I've changed my attitudes towards finances to some extent. I'll go into details in future posts.

This post is just an update to my muscle-building / fat-burning progress:









I'm no longer vegetarian (long story largely unrelated to nutrition).I'm heavier.I'm stronger.I'm older (now 31) :DI only work out twice per week now (it used to be three times, but I found no significant difference in progress by dropping to twice and possibly improved recovery of the big lifts - squat and deadlift).
Things that have not changed:

I'm still an IFer (LeanGains style, although since the whole thing is about convenience, I eat between 5pm and 10pm i.e. when I'm home from work).I still get the vast majority of my calories and protein from food (i.e. I don't use shakes).I still only supplement with a little whey protein and creatine (along with the obligatory multivitamin).I …