Let me preface this discussion by stating the following: I believe that the Paleo Diet is the best method of eating out there for me. It covers all the issues: Weight loss, hormone regulation, chronic disease protection, improved sleep, etc. The food is, for the most part, very satisfying. It has a lot of really great benefits. But I have found success through this way of eating to be difficult and often temporary. This is not due to a flaw in the science of the program. It has to do with a flaw in the way that I we think about getting healthy.

This happens to the majority of people who try to “get healthy”. What do we mean when we say that we want to “get healthy”? We mean “I want to lose weight and be skinny! I want to be the size _____ that I was in high school/college/before I had the baby…” That’s what we want. But here is the secret that no one ever tells you: You will never get there if that is all you are thinking about.

You need to have a better reason than that. What reason? I can’t tell you that. It’s different for everyone. (I think that I may have found mine…more on that in future posts…)

But, it’s not your fault that you fail for this reason. Remember how I just told you that you will never get there if that is all you are thinking about? Here’s the kicker: This whole game is set up to ensure that being skinny is all you are thinking about!!! The way that diet and fitness products are marketed and sold to you is mostly responsible for your unhealthy attitude towards adopting a healthy lifestyle.

I find it glib and insulting when I am lectured on this concept by people in the diet and fitness industry, or the Dieting Industrial Complex (DIC), as I call it. I find it particularly insulting when it comes from people who run gyms – especially CrossFit gyms. I also hate it when people who have never had a significant weight problem try to pull this bullshit. “How the fuck would you know?” I want to scream at them! There is a big emotional difference between a person who is carrying 5 or 10 extra pounds, versus someone who is carrying 100 extra pounds. There is also a big difference between a person who suffers from disordered eating and a person who doesn’t.

Think about it. This is an industry whose very survival is dependent upon people never believing that they are good enough, no matter how thin they are. How the hell else would these people continue to make money selling fitness and weight loss products that are basically the same tired old information repackaged to look like it’s new and revolutionary? They wouldn’t be able to because this stuff is not ”revolutionary”. And if you think it is, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. We’ve known fruits and vegetables are better for us than crème brulee for a long time now. And we’ve known that grains contribute to weight gain and disease for a century and a half. These concepts are not new.

The people that have found their real, true and lasting motivation for getting healthy are going to be fine. They will go on the program, solve their problem over time and you will never hear from them again. Their problem has been solved. It’s the people who are always wanting…always searching…those are your real customers. Those who seem to stay fat no matter what they do. Call it a lack of motivation all you want to, but you, Mr. or Ms. Health & Fitness Professional – you don’t want to solve these people’s problem any more that Big Pharma wants us all to “get well”. You may think you do, but you really don’t. Like Big Pharma, your industry wants to manage their illness. The illness of “never believing they are good enough” and “willingness to try anything you tell them to.” Why else would they buy your next book? Or join your “new and improved” gym? Let’s call a spade a spade. It’s the people that “just want to look hot” and don’t really care about adrenal fatigue that are funding your party. This $45 Billion industry is being kept afloat with their money, not the people who adopt the program for life on the first attempt. It’s these ”frivolous” people who just want to be skinny that you constantly shake your finger at that make people like you millionaires.

The reason that I keep failing at the paleo diet…is built into the paleo diet. If one of your main selling points is that your program will help people “lose weight fast” and then they try it and they don’t lose weight fast, they are going to quit. The program is not doing what it promised.

The reason I quit CrossFit is because I was led to believe that it would get me ripped very quickly. Four weeks, chronic exhaustion, a heel injury, one post-workout vomiting session and $250 later when I was sick, in pain, poorer and NOT ripped…I quit. As any sane person would. I did not get what was promised.

When you market a product by promising – or merely implying – that it will get rid of weight fast and half (or more) of the people on your program don’t lose weight fast and quit, who’s really to blame here? Them…or you? Promising fast, insane results is how you move product. ”Eat real food, be more active, and the weight will slowly, slowly go away over time if you just relax and don’t think about it so much…” – that doesn’t sell DVDs. And you think the solution to the quitting and lack of success problem is to endlessly chastise the quitters while continuing to make the unrealistic promises?  You should feel lucky that the 68.8% of people who are overweight or obese don’t ban together and lynch your ass in the parking lot!

Listen carefully, Dieting Industrial Complex: If you want people to stop quitting after failing to experience EXTREME results, then stop promising EXTREME results in order to sell your product. It’s really that simple.

I confess that I never had much respect for Mika Brzezinski. I had never read any of her previous books, and I fear that I based my poor opinion of her on a handful of dumb statements that she has made on the MSNBC show, Morning Joe over the years. I had her pegged as more of a Sherri Shephard-esque figure; the very thing that makes most morning television unbearable for me to watch. I am hereby stating that I stand corrected. While I do not suddenly believe that Ms. Brzezinski is a rocket scientist, I refuse to label her as a Morning Show Twit anymore based on my reading of her latest book Obsessed: America’s Food Addiction–and My Own.

I started this blog with a mission: I wanted to separate the idea of being thin from the idea of being healthy. As any thinking person knows, those things can be mutually exclusive. I wanted to provide real information on how to be healthy and avoid chronic disease. For some people, physical health is their issue plain and simple. When they have good information they clean up there diet, get more sleep and become more active. Their physical health improves, even if their weight loss is minimal or they experience no weight loss at all. But the word “healthy“ can often be used as a substitute for the word “thin“. This allows society to shame fat people for no other reason than the fact that they are fat. It gives credence to the stereotype that if you do not have a “normal” BMI, you are automatically unhealthy and people have a right to judge you or try to shame you into becoming thin (as if that ever works).

Ms. Brzezinski’s book is about food addiction. The idea for writing it was born out of an awkward conversation that she had with her best friend Diane - another journalist. Diane was about 100 pounds overweight and Mika confronted her while they were sailing off the coast of Long Island one day:

‘Diane,’ I said, ‘you can’t climb onto this boat without help. Is that how you want to live? Your whole body hurts and your joints are killing you. Why do you think that is? I am just going to say it. It’s because you are fat.’

She then made a deal with Diane. Mika would pay her to lose weight. Now I know what you’re thinking. “What a shitty friend!!” Right? But here is the catch: Both Mika and her best friend have been binge eaters for decades. The only difference is that through sheer luck, near-constant starvation and bulimic-type exercise, Mika managed to maintain a size 2 figure, while her friend experienced a significant weight gain during the course of their 15-year friendship. Mika knew that her friend’s weight was dangerously high and her own was dangerously low. The deal was that they would both deal with their food issues once and for all. The friend would lose weight and Mika would gain weight. She told her friend that day:

‘Other people don’t see the beautiful person I see when I look at you. They see a woman who looks like her life is out of control, who can’t even manage her own body.‘

This is an important point and this was why my mind was a bit blown by this book. First let’s talk a bit about perception.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where facts and reality don’t matter very much (Did they ever matter?). It’s all about people’s perception. And the truth is that when people (even other fat people) look at a fat person, particularly a fat woman…or even worse…a fat woman of color (i.e. me), they will proceed to make certain types of judgments about her. I’m lazy, undisciplined, sloppy, out of control, etc… It’s hard enough in this world to be black and female. This already may have cost me a job. Being fat just seems to be piling on. And since good jobs are becoming scare as the economy becomes more and more unstable, I think it’s time for me to face this harsh reality. It doesn’t matter how articulate I am or how great my resume is. I may not even get the chance to show a potential employer what I can do merely due to their prejudice. And it sucks. IT SUCKS. It absolutely blows large disgusting chunks that the world is like that. But it’s the world we live in. Another person’s perception of you matters a great deal when they are the person who decides whether or not you get a job. And as a person who has been unemployed or underemployed for going on 7 years now, I can tell you that this situation is now beginning to translate into dollars and cents for me. This is becoming increasingly unacceptable because I fear it may, literally, be costing me. It may be costing me a better life. A life that I really want.

Secondly, I am not healthy. Physically, I’m fine, but psychologically and emotionally, not so much. And by pretending that I am just so that I can be a good little feminist and write a fat-positive blog that doesn’t ruffle any feathers within the fat acceptance or feminist communities doesn’t change the fact that I have (gulp)…an eating disorder. I’ve had one for awhile now. I have been hesitant to discuss this subject in detail until now. Hello, my name is Therese and I am a chronic binge eater. I binge eat alone when I am bored, depressed, stressed out or anxious…and sometimes I exercise in an attempt to “burn off” the binge, which I suppose makes me a bulimic as well as exercise in this context is a form of “purging”. I admit that I’m not as obsessive about it as I used to be, but just because Mika Brzesinski was able to hide her food issues behind a size 2 body doesn’t make she and I any different. Like me, Mika struggled with binge eating and food addiction her entire life – beginning when she was a young child. Apparently, she was a World Heavyweight Champion binge eater. In the book, she describes times in her life when she inhaled 3 Big Macs and piles of French fries in one sitting, ate whole pizzas in secret in her college dorm room and polished off an entire jar of Nutella with her bare hands after taking a dose of Ambien one night. (Some people sleepwalk while on Ambien…she sleep-ate.) I used to pretend I was sick when I was a kid so that I could have the house to myself. While my family was gone, I would binge eat from a stash of candy that I had hidden in my room. Sometimes I’d make a pan of brownies or cookies, eat them all, then do the dishes and throw away the brownie mix box in the neighbors trash can to hide the evidence. I still take stress-fueled trips to the Mexican bakery for pastries every few weeks. I can polish off 3 croissants, 4 donuts, 2 large chocolate covered biscuits and 2 huge chocolate chip cookies…in a matter of minutes. Does that sound healthy to you?

Mika Brzezinski had some physical problems, too, as a result of her food issues. She visited two different nutritionists while writing this book and both confirmed she was seriously under nourished. There was not nearly enough fat or protein in her diet. She was also exhausted from her obsessive exercise regime. A therapist diagnosed her with “orthorexia nervosa” – an unhealthy obsession with healthy food.

I stated clearly in my first post:

Let me be clear: I am not against weight loss. What I am against is weight loss being required for everyone as the ultimate “cure” for the “disease” of being fat.

I am not sick because I am fat. I am sick because I have an unhealthy relationship with food. It’s this unhealthy relationship that, over a period of 25 years, has made me fat and is keeping me that way. The constant dieting that I have done has only made the problem worse. Periods of dieting-induced deprivation only end up feeding (so to speak) the fire that is the binging cycle. It just gives it more air. The fat is a symptom of a greater problem, not a problem within itself.

I always thought that I was unique in this way. I never thought I was like those other women with eating disorders. In all the ABC After School specials I watched about anorexia and bulimia, the girls were always thin. I thought an eating disorder was a thin woman’s disease, but on page 116 of Obsessed, Mika points out that there is a growing amount of research that links obesity and eating disorders. I am by no means stating that EVERY fat person has these issues. These are just mine. My blog, my experiences. I could very well fix my psychological issues and still remain fat. Who knows? But I have a sneaking suspicion that these issues are what has made me fat and have been keeping me that way. How do I know? Because when they go away, I’m thinner. Not Mika Brzezinski thin, but significantly thinner. I have had temporary bouts of normalcy in my relationship with food. There have been times when I don’t really think about food much at all. During those periods of my life when I was happy, had a job I enjoyed and experienced less stress, I lost weight. And it happened effortlessly. I didn’t even have to think about it. In 2001 while vacationing in Italy, I lost 10 pounds…in a week, while eating the most decadent Northern Italian cuisine you could possibly imagine. And by the way, Mika’s friend never had to think about how she ate when she was younger. Her issues with food only began with a traumatic life event: Her boyfriend died in a car accident when she was in her early 20s. I am still in the process of tracing my food issues back to their origin.

In an article in the New York Daily News, Mika makes the following statement:

Saying someone is fat is not a judgment—it’s a description. We need to stop  blaming and shaming people who struggle with their weight, and start figuring out how to help them, and help all of us, find a healthy way to eat.

Sounds good to me.

P.S. There were some problems I had with the book. I’m not wild about the term “healthy thin” that’s used throughout the book. I think I get what she means, but those two words really need to be separated because they are two different things. I also hated the food-shaming of pregnant women on page 184 that blamed things that happen in utero as a result of the pregnant woman’s diet for a child’s food issues later on in life. In reading this book, I did my best to separate the wheat from the chaff. I’m also still a bit uncomfortable with the whole idea of paying your friend to lose weight. To quote Dodai Stewart at Jezebel: “Let’s not make it a habit of calling our friends fat and offering them cash to lose weight, mmmkay?” However, Mika did redeem herself a bit on page 220, where she provides a chart explaining what NOT to say to your kid when talking to them about food. So, there’s that. Furthermore, she also lays a good portion of the blame where it belongs: at the feet of the food companies that have drawn on decades worth of research to figure out ways to manipulate the chemical structure of our food in order to deliberately engineer addiction. This cannot be stated enough, if you ask me.

The diet that most people in the U.S. subsist upon is commonly referred to by health advocates as the S.A.D. – The Standard American Diet. In generally consists of the following:

• processed carbohydrates in the form of cereals, breads, pasta, and baked goods
• industrially produced and processed meat products that are loaded with carcinogens due to being cooked at very high temperatures
• processed seed oils – corn oil, soybean oil, and other partially hydrogenated vegetable oils
• dangerous food additives and sweeteners, such as monosodium glutamate (MSG), high fructose corn syrup; various dyes and preservatives, like Butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT)
• produce covered with pesticides and herbicides grown in nutritionally deficient soil

The S.A.D., however, contains very little of the following:

• raw, organic vegetables and fruit free of pesticides and herbicides that’s grown in nutrient-rich soil
• meat from animals that are allowed to eat fresh grass while at pasture, rather than industrially processed corn feed and are not given antibiotics
• natural fat sources from the above-mentioned grass-fed animal meat, avocados, coconut oil, raw nuts and organic butter from a grass-fed cow
• healthy grains and starchy vegetables like sweet potatoes, organic wild rice, or quinoa

The basic problems with this S.A.D. way of eating is that it contains a great amount of substances that are toxic to your body and very few micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) that tend to protect you from heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. It’s the ultimate starvation diet – it starves you of the nutrients that you need in order to maintain good health.

So how do you fix this? I have found find that a great way to begin is to make sure that most of the plant food that you eat is raw. My blood work is always the best when I am eating lots of raw food. Raw produce will be the most nutritive because cooking food tends to destroy its nutrients. This is especially true if you cook food at very high temperatures. If you are not a fan of salads, try lightly steaming your veggies so that they remain bright in color and a bit crunchy. Juicing vegetables is also a good way to get lots of micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) into the body very quickly. Back in the 1930s, a man named Dr. Francis Pottenger, M.D. conducted a study on raw food. He did a decade-long controlled study where he fed one group of cats raw food and one cooked food. The cats who ate all raw food thrived, while those who ate all cooked food did not. But here is the interesting thing. What would happened if a person made sure that at least half their food intake was raw and the rest could be cooked? The same thing. Their health would thrive…at least according to a study done by Dr. Paul Kouchakoff in the 1930s (and my own experiences with raw food consumption). He conducted human feeding experiments that he presented at the First International Congress of Microbiology. He fed male and female human subjects of different ages different combinations of raw and cooked foods. He found that consuming more cooked foods resulted in higher count of white blood cells – this is an immune response. It’s your body fighting off disease; an invader of some kind. While the specifics of the immune response are unknown, it’s still an interesting experiment.

So what have we learned: As long as we include as much fresh, raw plant food as possible, eat well-sourced animal products, and avoid most processed food, we’ll be alright. There is no one way of eating that’s any better than another. You just have to experiment and see what works for you. The only “bad” diet, is a S.A.D. one.

“Animal Meat Is High In Fat and Cholesterol and Therefore BAD for Your Health”

In other parts of the world, people tend to eat more of a variety of animal proteins. But here in the U.S. most Americans stick with three kinds: beef, pork and chicken. The Vegetarian/Vegans main “beef” seems to be with…well, beef. So let’s deal with that. The United States is the world’s largest beef producer, exporter, and importer. In the year 2000, it was estimated that the Americans ate over 64 pounds of beef annually per capita. Back in the 70s, we ate more than 80 pounds per year. Wow. Let’s deal with the fat and cholesterol argument. Beginning in the 70s and 80s it was common wisdom that saturated fat was bad for your health. In order to lose weight and cut your risk of heart attack, you were told to eat a low fat diet of lean protein, whole grains, fruits and vegetables. This is what’s known as The Lipid Hypothesis. However, a recent study linking meat consumption to increased mortality showed only correlation, not necessarily causation. That is, the people that ate more meat suffered from more disease, but the study did not definitively show that it was the meat consumption that caused it. I would also like to point out that the subjects of this study ate processed meat. Not all meat is created equal. More on that later.

We now know that the consumption of dietary fat – even saturated fat – and cholesterol have little or nothing to do with your development of heart disease and obesity. Atherosclerosis (heart disease) happens when low density lipoprotein (LDL) particles become oxidized and get stuck to the walls of your arteries creating blockages. Nothing more. It’s a disease of inflammation. Substances become oxidized when electrons are stolen from the molecules. Then then become unstable and begin to cause problems in the body. This is why doctors and nutritionists tell you to include plant foods in your diet that are high in anti-oxidants. Anti-oxidants help guard against oxidation. They are anti-inflammatory. For the scientific deets on saturated fat and cardiovascular disease, read this.

As for fat making you fat…dietary fat consumption doesn’t raise your insulin levels. Sugar does. Insulin is the fat storing hormone. Fat actually helps stabilize your insulin levels, provides more satiety, which makes you more sensitive to leptin (the hormone that tells you when you’re full), and protects your brain. In the last 30 years we have been consuming less fat but have simultaneously been growing fatter. Our consumption of sugar, however, has skyrocketed. So there’s that.

“Any Nutrients That Meat Has Are Destroyed in the Cooking Process”

This is not necessarily true. If you are eating meat that’s fed grass rather than grain, the meat will be more nutritious from the start. Health advocate and journalist Michael Pollen author of In Defense of Food, explains why he believes that consuming grass-fed meat is preferable. I agree. The fat from grass-fed animals contains higher levels of omega 3 fatty acids and CLA – two very important nutrients.  The method of cooking is also important. Here is more information on the difference between grass-fed and grain-fed meat. And if you’re going to eat cooked food, animal meat is the best kind to cook because saturated fat is more stable than unsaturated fat and can withstand high temperatures required for cooking. Just don’t deep fry or barbeque meat. That will definitely destroy nutrients and add carcinogens, which are cancer causing. Furthermore, meat is usually deep fried in partially hydrogenated oils (trans fat), which are the worst thing you could possible eat!

“The Environmental Impact of Meat Production  and Consumption is Unsustainable”

This one’s a bit more complicated. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition published a study concluding that a “meat-based food system requires more energy, land, and water resources than the lactoovovegetarian diet.” By the way “lactoovovegetarian” means people who eat dairy products and eggs, but no meat. I had a similar vegetarian diet in college. I agree with this argument. However, this study looked at our current meat-based food system. This includes large feed lots crammed with animals that are fed grains, get sick and are then given antibiotics. This process produces methane gas (linked to climate change) and all kinds of terrible industrial runoff that poisons the soil and water. This system was created from the need to feed a growing population as cheaply as possible. We needed bigger, fatter animals that produce more milk and meat. However, if Americans ate the amount of meat we actually needed to sustain good health (I don’t have a specific number for you, but it’s damn sure a lot less than what we are currently eating), we would not need to produce as much. Also, if the U.S. Government stopped subsidizing GMO-laden wheat, corn, and soy, and meat products produced by the behemoth corporate farming industry and began subsidizing organic farms that produced highly nutritive, sustainable meat and produce, we could make that food just as affordable as the cheap poisonous items currently in your neighborhood supermarket. What would that system look like? When you stick to eating meat that is only organic, grass-fed and pastured, you will naturally eat less meat. This type of meat is more expensive and there is less of it. You learn to make it last. When I buy pieces of pastured grass-fed meat, I have the butcher butterfly them and cut them in half. What was one large serving of meat now becomes four. What if our food stamps system was reformed to allow the poor to have access to the same quality of meat and produce that an upper-middle class person has. What would that world look like? How sustainable would it be? Pretty damned sustainable, I’d say. By the way, do you know who the biggest customer in this industrial meat market is? The Fast Food companies. If we stopped – or severed reduced – our consumption of fast food, that alone would go a long way in making our food system more sustainable. For a good look at how that system works, I highly recommend the film Fast Food Nation. Here’s the trailer:

Bottom line: Nobody’s all right or all wrong here. Meat consumption can be sustainable. So vegans and vegetarians, please stop shaming responsible meat-eaters. And paleo and primal folks, please stop hating on the vegans and vegetarians. We all have more in common than we think. We all believe in eating natural organic food and are fed up with the industrialized food-like substances that fill our supermarket shelves that are making us sicker and sicker. If we start working together instead of fighting, maybe we can slay this Food Goliath once and for all and experience that sustainable Food Utopia that we all want.

Here is a rarely seen image of Marilyn Monroe. She is doing something that we seldom associate with 1950s pinup gals: she is lifting weights.

A growing amount of research in exercise physiology is beginning to show that no exercise gives you the best bang for your buck when it comes to both preventing disease, injury, and staying lean (if that’s what you’re into) more than strength training. It’s the best, bar none. Body builders and those who play sports (especially those with the word “Extreme” in front of the title) have known this for years. The average gym goer, however, is still figuring it out. There is a very pervasive myth among women that lifting weights will make you look bulky and unfeminine. This myth exists even among the so-called fitness “experts”, who really should know better. If you just open your eyes and look at women who lift weights, this could not be further from the truth. This is dumb enough, as refusing to train with weights, particularly heavy weights that challenge you keeps many of us weak, prone to injury and keeps our bones brittle. I have only recently let go of this myth. In 2012, two of my female relatives (who are skinnier and therefore assumed to be healthier than me) seriously injured themselves doing basic household tasks and had to go under the knife in order to repair their injuries. I have never had a serious injury. I was, however, recently diagnosed with plantar fasciitis, an inflammation of the tendons in my foot. This was caused by my brief relationship with Cross Fit…which I did in the fall of 2012 because I had heard that it would result in massive fat loss. Sigh. When will I learn? Thanks to orthopedic shoe inserts, stretching, good nutrition and supplementation, that injury is almost completely healed. I believe that my ability to avoid injury (particularly back injuries) is due to the fact that I do some sort of resistance training twice a week. Also, because resistance training is a no-impact workout, minor injuries like my foot injury do not prevent me from continuing it, unlike other forms of exercise where your entire fitness regimen has to be put on hold even for a minor injury.

You’d think the situation was bad enough, but there is an even more bizarre trend that I have been noticing: Men who are either afraid to lift weights or just have zero interest in it. Some of them (even the heterosexual ones!) have no interest in building mass or strength. They, too, fear getting “bulky”. Whaaatt? Two men that I spoke to last year do cardio up the wazoo (In all fairness, one was training for a distance run, but even when he wasn’t he never lifted weights). However, studies of distance running performance now show that shorter but more intense sprints and weight training also help your distance performance, but there’s no convincing these dudes. This is the way marathoners train in Kenya, where leaving people in the dust in marathons is a national industry. But they want to be skinny, these men. But roll up to a dude and call him a p*ssy and the threat of being accused of weakness will drive him to fight. It seems these days that people not only have no interest in being strong, they don’t even want to look strong. But they get upset when they are perceived as being weak. Huh?

I happen to think muscle is unisex; it looks great on everyone. I associate muscles with strength, which I then associate with masculity (and femininity as well). I may be reaching here, but I think these anti-dumbell attitudes are indicative on a larger cultural problem.

This used to be associated primarily with women. We are socialized to think that strength is not feminine and so we temper ourselves in order to make sure that we don’t look too strong and powerful in a way that we think will threaten a man (especially if we are trying to have a romantic relationship with him). Women who have any physical trait associated with being male, or at least associated with being un-feminine, will always be judged. This is true whether you look like this:

Or whether you look like this:

In all fairness, the second example is judged the most harshly. I had a discussion over at Shakesville about this last year. But even men seem to fear strength these days. And the ones who don’t seem to be only body builders, Cross Fit types and these corporate war criminal oligarchs who want to bomb Iran just so that we don’t “look weak”. But is “being strong” the same thing as “not looking weak?” I don’t think so.

I think we need a cultural shift here. We need to focus on both looking strong and being strong, rather than only having the fear of looking weak. A strong person doesn’t have to consistently posture or pull a bunch of bullsh*t dangerous stunts to prove their strength. If you are truly strong, you won’t have to do that. It’s like the writer Elbert Hubbard said:

Strong men can always afford to be gentle. Only the weak are intent on giving as good as they get.

My advice? Look strong. Be strong. That way, you’ll rarely have to do much to prove it.