Category Archives: Health / Fitness

To continue my fledgling Health / Fitness series entitled, “A strong mind starts with a strong body,” tonight I want to briefly touch on working out while traveling. (Speaking of traveling, I’m once again posting missives from my road trip on my travel blog.)

On June 1st I will have been on the road for 150 out of 365 days (excluding my time in Boulder). During this massive year of travel I have devised new strategies to keep fit.

First, use free weights over machines. If you lift weights regularly, you know that correct settings and positioning is key to safety. Instead of fiddling with machines you’ve never used before, just use free weights and target the same muscle groups. (Note: some machines are “standard” — a bench press is a bench press anywhere in the world.)

Second, if you have the choice, go to a real local gym over a hotel “fitness room”. Top hotels don’t skimp, but most do.

Third, if you want to go for a run outside, know your way. There’s nothing worse than thinking you’re going to explore a city’s geography and then getting lost. Have a map. Or better yet, follow Chris Sacca’s advice and get Garmin GPS device. I haven’t used it, but I hear good things. Although I favor a gym to outdoor running, an urban city run — especially overseas — can be magical if you know your way. I had a great run along a lake in Rome and through grass fields in Dresden, Germany.

Fourth, don’t forget pushups and crunches. Two simple exercises which can take you a long way. Rob Urstein also recommends RipCords and jump rope as easy, portable exercise tools to bring with you.

Fifth, focus on cardio. After long plane or car travel you need to get the blood moving. If you must turn a 1.5 hour routine into 45 minutes, cut back on the beach muscles and just focus on the heart rate.

Sixth, value a free hotel breakfast. I always try to book hotels that offer a free breakfast. There’s nothing worse than trying to find a breakfast joint at the start of the day. (I won’t even consider the possibility of you skipping breakfast given the evidence in support of the meal!)

Any other tips for staying fit on the road?

Wal-Mart’s “Personal Sustainability Project” for employees, as reported in this NYT article, is fantastic. We all need to cultivate a sense of self-improvement — we can improve our mind and body — and I love how Wal-Mart is investing in programs to encourage this thinking among their massive employee pool. With health care costs soaring, I suspect many companies will embrace various health, fitness, and new-age programs.

During a workshop in Houston several weeks ago, Wal-Mart managers and hourly workers spent five hours at the zoo learning about environmental sustainability, a lesson that included tips on reducing carbon emissions and consuming healthier, more environmentally friendly food. By the end of the day, each employee had written down a pledge — or, in the program’s parlance, a personal sustainability practice.

“I want to start recycling around my home,” said Curtis Tipton, a manager.

“Improve my physical health with food and exercise,” said Ferne Oyster, who works in a grocery department.

“Spend more quality time with my family,” said Miriam Crosby, who runs a Wal-Mart in the area.

Although the theory of happiness is fascinating, sometimes it’s nice to simply review some quick hacks to increase this elusive quotient. As I type this, I feel quite happy — two chocolate truffles in my stomach (it’s the little things), two terrifying hours of 24, and the Beatles playing softly in the background. New York magazine suggests (excerpts):

Don’t go to law school.
Lawyers are 3.6 times more likely to be depressed than members of other professions, and it’s not just because their jobs are more stressful. For most people, job stress has little effect on happiness unless it is accompanied by a lack of control (lawyers, of course, have clients to listen to) or involves taking something away from somebody else (a common feature of the legal system).

Fire your therapist if he so much as mentions your childhood.
Contra Freud and pro common sense, much of Authentic Happiness author Martin Seligman’s research suggests that rehashing events that enraged you long ago tends to produce depression rather than sweet closure and relief.

If someone tells you he’s still pining for his ex, ask the ex out.
Stumbling on Happiness author Dan Gilbert is currently conducting a study designed to show that the best way to predict how much you’ll enjoy a blind date is to ask the last person to go out with your date how much fun he had.

If you can’t decide what TV to buy, walk across the hall and ask your neighbor if he likes his.
In multiple studies, subjects felt they’d be better able to predict their reaction to an experience by imagining it, rather than hearing somebody else’s testimony. Even regarding such seemingly straightforward activities as deciding whether to eat pretzels or potato chips, they were wrong. Turns out, people are happier following advice.

Send the kids off to day care, summer camp, and boarding school.
On a day-to-day basis, caring for children creates roughly the same level of satisfaction as washing the dishes. In fact, surveys of parents invariably find a clear dip in happiness after the Blessed Miracle of Childbirth, which continues unabated for twenty years—bottoming out during adolescence—and only returns to pre-birth levels when the child finally leaves home.

But make sure they’re busy once they get there.
Seligman cites research indicating that children who develop hobbies and interests besides loitering and watching TV are much more likely to be satisfied later in life.

If you go on a shopping spree, throw away the receipts.
In one study cited by both Schwartz and Gilbert, photography students were allowed to keep only one picture taken during their course. Some students were later allowed to swap their choice for a different photo, yet those who couldn’t change were much happier. How did they deal with inflexibility? By rationalizing how much they enjoyed their new decoration.

If you’re on the fence about whether to sell your stock, sell it.
Most people predict that they’d be more unhappy if they sold a stock that went through the roof than if they kept one that tanked. They’re wrong—aggressive actions that go awry are mentally catalogued as valuable learning experiences.

Take the local, and don’t wait for the express.
Inaction, on the other hand, gnaws away at the mind relentlessly, like so many rats chewing on an empty Mountain Dew bottle someone dropped onto the tracks as you idly waited for the 4. You should have just jumped on the 6.

Give up the great American novel, and start temping.
Some poor countries (China, Brazil) are happier than others, but few nations are mired in spiritually fulfilling poverty. Money, when used to feel secure about your ability to shelter and feed yourself, can, in fact, buy happiness.

But don’t work overtime . . .
The marginal life-enhancing value of each extra dollar quickly levels off, however; hence the existence of James Bond villains and studies showing that lottery winners and Forbes 100 members are no more likely to be satisfied than anyone else.

. . . As long as you’re content socializing within your tax bracket.
Nevertheless, being aware of how much less money one has acquired than one’s peers is quantifiably frustrating.

Join a church, a yoga studio, an Alcoholics Anonymous group, or an underground fight club.
People who have more friends and belong to community-building groups are happier. To paraphrase the Norm MacDonald–era “Weekend Update,” perhaps that’s the kind of finding that could have been published in the scientific journal Duh, but there it is.

Order from the same takeout menu every time.
Researchers found that subjects asked to choose their meals weeks in advance mistakenly predicted that variety would make them happier, while those who simply decided what to eat on the spot were completely satisfied with the same thing each week. (Although eating macaroni and cheese endlessly, like repeating any pleasant experience over and over, reduces its appeal—so switch it up with cheeseburgers.)

Take advantage of your exercise machine’s “cooldown period.”
One study found that men who underwent short, uniformly unpleasant colonoscopies found them more repulsive than men who had long procedures with a brief respite near the end. Adding a slightly less grueling epilogue to a grueling but valuable experience—like a workout—makes you more willing to repeat it in the future, even if it means an increase in the overall gruel endured.

Ask the next person you meet on Match.com to marry you.
Studies show that married people are happier than unmarried people. Too much choice, whether over tonight’s dinner or your partner for the next 50 years, can create paralysis and anxiety. If you make a mistake, you have the capacity to rationalize the worst decisions. And if all of that doesn’t work, well, we’re able to find happiness in even the most hopeless situations.

(Hat tip to Chris Yeh for the pointer)

Michael Pollan had what I expect will be a legendary article in the nutrition / health canon last Sunday in the New York Times magazine. It is extraordinarily well-written, entertaining, and practical. It examines the new science of “nutritionism” and how the practice of examining food nutrient-by-nutritent, “takes the nutrient out of the context of food, the food out of the context of diet and the diet out of the context of lifestyle.”

Pollan notes that pressure from specific food industries, processed food, and nutritional surveys (on which most people lie about their eating habits) are all among the reasons for the misinformation about proper diet. Heck, if the American Heart Association simply charges marketers for their endorsement, something must be seriously wrong.

The article ends with nine, “flagrantly unscientific” rules of thumb for good nutrition. Excerpts:

1. Eat food. Though in our current state of confusion, this is much easier said than done. So try this: Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. (Sorry, but at this point Moms are as confused as the rest of us, which is why we have to go back a couple of generations, to a time before the advent of modern food products.) There are a great many foodlike items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn’t recognize as food (Go-Gurt? Breakfast-cereal bars? Nondairy creamer?); stay away from these.

2. Avoid even those food products that come bearing health claims. They’re apt to be heavily processed, and the claims are often dubious at best….

3. Especially avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable c) more than five in number — or that contain high-fructose corn syrup. None of these characteristics are necessarily harmful in and of themselves, but all of them are reliable markers for foods that have been highly processed.

4. Get out of the supermarket whenever possible. You won’t find any high-fructose corn syrup at the farmer’s market; you also won’t find food harvested long ago and far away. What you will find are fresh whole foods picked at the peak of nutritional quality….

5. Pay more, eat less. The American food system has for a century devoted its energies and policies to increasing quantity and reducing price, not to improving quality. There’s no escaping the fact that better food — measured by taste or nutritional quality (which often correspond) — costs more, because it has been grown or raised less intensively and with more care….

6. Eat mostly plants, especially leaves. Scientists may disagree on what’s so good about plants — the antioxidants? Fiber? Omega-3s? — but they do agree that they’re probably really good for you and certainly can’t hurt. Also, by eating a plant-based diet, you’ll be consuming far fewer calories, since plant foods (except seeds) are typically less “energy dense” than the other things you might eat. Vegetarians are healthier than carnivores, but near vegetarians (“flexitarians”) are as healthy as vegetarians…

7. Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks. Confounding factors aside, people who eat according to the rules of a traditional food culture are generally healthier than we are. Any traditional diet will do: if it weren’t a healthy diet, the people who follow it wouldn’t still be around. True, food cultures are embedded in societies and economies and ecologies, and some of them travel better than others: Inuit not so well as Italian. In borrowing from a food culture, pay attention to how a culture eats, as well as to what it eats. In the case of the French paradox, it may not be the dietary nutrients that keep the French healthy (lots of saturated fat and alcohol?!) so much as the dietary habits: small portions, no seconds or snacking, communal meals — and the serious pleasure taken in eating. (Worrying about diet can’t possibly be good for you.) Let culture be your guide, not science.

8. Cook. And if you can, plant a garden.

9. Eat like an omnivore. Try to add new species, not just new foods, to your diet. The greater the diversity of species you eat, the more likely you are to cover all your nutritional bases…

To continue my fledgling health / fitness series, today I’m going to cover the importance of diversity in your fitness efforts.

This is intuitive. If we do anything over and over again we get bored. Keeping your workouts fresh and interesting (just like your life!) is essential for being happy at the gym. When it comes to exercise, however, there’s another important reason to mix up your routine: you don’t want to overwork some muscles and let other muscles languish.

Since your workout should ideally contain some cardio and some weights, let’s look at how we can be creative in each category.

Cardio. If you always run on the treadmill for thirty minutes, do it for 20 minutes and ride the stationary bike for 10 minutes. The elliptical is another good cardio alternative that doesn’t pressure your knees much. Treadmill, bike, and elliptical are the three main cardio options. Try each. The advantage to the bike, by the way, is you can read while riding. I listen to music on treadmill or elliptical.

Weights. This is more complicated, but still easy. The goal here is to identify your major muscle groups and vary the exercises which target each group. The easy way to diversify is to sometimes use machine weights and sometimes use free weights. Machine weights are easier to handle and can offer resistance all the way through a rep. Free weights allow more customization and build “stability” muscle fibers. If you’re traveling and in a foreign gym, always use free weights because free weights are the same around the world. Machine weights require proper settings in order to be effective (and not injurious) and if you’re traveling it takes too long to find the appropriate setting.

The muscle groups I care about are: upper back, lower back, chest, abs, quads, calves, and hamstrings. Note that this is not all about looks. Even if you don’t care about being muscle-bound, lifting weights is still recommended by doctors even for older people. The free-weight exercises I do:

• Flat bench press — This is the classic exercise which works your chest, biceps, and triceps all at once. It’s the best total workout. Note: Many women do chest exercises to increase their bust, but it’s best to use a machine for this and not free weights.
• Incline bench press — This works your upper chest. Don’t forget to bring the bar right under your chin.
• Lat pulldown — This works your upper back.
• Lat row — This targets your lower back and general back thickness.
• Leg press — The classic leg exercise which works your quads and hips.
• Hamstring curl — Works the back of your leg — aka your hamstring.
• Toe lifts — Calves.
• Abs — Instead of using a crunch machine, I just do crunches and leg raises to work the abs.

All these exercises have machine equivalents.

Finally, in addition to alternating between machine and free-weight, you might also experiment with second tier muscle groups. For example, I’ve been doing a forearm exercise and liking it quite a bit.

Bottom Line: It’s more fun / interesting when you spice up your routine, and it also makes health sense to make sure you’re exercising your entire body.