How You Like Them Apples

I am, by nature, a very skeptical person. Which comes in handy in the fitness and nutrition worlds, where ardently-claimed but scientifically-bankrupt stupidity abounds.

That’s why, though I grew up in the Bay Area, even at one point attended a summer camp where we had to ‘thank the spirit of the water’ each time we flushed the toilet, I’ve long been skeptical of the whole ‘farm to table’ movement.

I’d written off a lot of the appeal as hipster nonsense – the twee fetishizing of the ’craftsmen’ ethos. Sure, buying at a farmer’s market allows you to vicariously live a small slice of the farmers’ neo-luddite life. But farmers’ market food is, well, still just food.

Turns out, I was totally wrong.

Over the last few months, I’ve been spending more time learning about the mechanics of the global food production system, and its impact on the nutrition of what we eat.

Consider an apple. You see them, year-round, in large piles at every grocery store. Appealingly glossy, perfectly ripe, available organically-raised in an endless array of varieties.

But here’s something you probably don’t think about when you see them: those apples are old. Really, really old.

In fact, on average, the apples in your grocery store, whether organic or not, were picked ten months ago. Then they were stored in extreme cold for months and months. Cold generated using a mix of gasses that are so toxic that produce workers intermittently die just from going in to the apple storage freezers with a leak in their protective gear.

And even if that gas doesn’t permeate the apple itself, the effects of time certainly do.

By the time you pick that apple off your grocery store shelf, it has less than 10% of the micro-nutrient content than it did a week after it was plucked. In other words, we spend huge amounts of money converting a vitamin-packed healthy snack into a empty-calorie sugar bomb.

So, what can you do? That’s where farmer’s markets come in. The food you’re buying there this week was, on average, picked within the last two weeks. Which, when it comes to nutritional content, is a world of difference. Plus it tastes better, too. And, in most cases, it even costs less than the stuff you can find in-store.

So, it appears, I’ve circled back to my hippy roots after all. I’ve resolved to shop for more produce (and meat and cheese and more) at my local farmer’s market this year. You can find ones near you with this handy USDA tool, and I’d encourage you to do the same.

Keep Principles Principal

“As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Feeling Bulletproof

I’m a big believer in intermittent fasting, and usually don’t eat my first meal of the day until 1:00 or 2:00pm.

I do, however, drink coffee most mornings. And recently, especially if I’m feeling hungry, I’ve been test-driving ’Bulletproof Coffee.’ Dreamed up by body-hacker Dave Asprey, it’s a recipe that’s since become a ’thing’ in both the Silicon Valley and sports performance worlds. In theory, at least, it’s meant to boost metabolism and mental performance, and to make people feel full without spiking insulin.

Here’s what goes into it:

  1. 1cup Coffee. Freshly-roasted, freshly-ground coffee has higher anti-oxidant content, so buy beans regularly, and grind them yourself. (Asprey himself sells a coffee bean that supposedly has lower mold content, though the science backing the danger of mold in coffee seems weak at best.) If you’re like me, and way too lazy for that, buy a Nespresso machine instead. It makes great coffee (they’re in use by 30% of the Michelin-starred restaurants in the world!), and uses vacuum-packed capsules that keep the coffee grinds exceedingly fresh (enough so to even counter the mold/mycotoxin concern, if it turns out to hold water). I use two Fortissio Lungo capsules, each brewed as 110ml lungo pulls, which yields a delicious 8oz cup.
  2. 1tbs Butter. As Michael Pollan noted, you aren’t just what you eat; you’re also what you eat eats. Grass-fed butter turns out to be waaaay healthier than grain-fed butter, and you can buy Kerrygold all over the country (in places like Costco, Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods). While grass-fed butter is loaded with nutrients, it’s the butyrate in particular, a fuel that’s particularly good at powering your brain, that gives you a mental boost.
  3. 1tbs Coconut Oil. For bonus points, you can swap the coconut oil for medium-chain triglyceride oil, which contains the portion of the coconut oil that has the most beneficial effects. I like this brand, which is extremely high-quality yet reasonably priced, and comes in a container large enough to last several months.

Here’s how you make it:

  1. Put all three into a blender. As I’m way too cheap for a Vitamix, (especially as I mostly just blend protein shakes or bulletproof coffee), I’ve used an earlier version of this sucker for several years with excellent results.
  2. Blend! Should only take a couple seconds. You’re set when there’s a thick froth on top, like the foam on top of a latte.
  3. (Add Cinnamon?) This one’s an optional bonus step, which I only started recently based on some of cinnamon’s clear health benefits. Also, it tastes awesome.
  4. Drink. Then feel excellent – both physically and mentally – for hours to come.

At least, that’s the theory. Thus far, I seem to be liking it. But I’ll be tracking performance and biomarkers going forward to see the impact longer-term.

And, either way, a very important warning: WHEN YOU FIRST START DRINKING BULLETPROOF COFFEE, START WITH ONLY A TEASPOON EACH OF BUTTER AND OIL, AND BUILD UP SLOWLY. It can be a bit of a shock to you digestive tract, and you want to give your body a week or so to get used to things as you build up to full strength.

Relatedly, a brief cautionary tale:

About a year ago, I was at a fitness event. A booth there was selling Bulletproof Coffee, and they were bringing freshly-blended cups for free to the VIP area, where I happened to be with a friend.

When we first arrived, we both grabbed a cup to try. Then we headed our separate ways. A few hours later, I ran into him again, and the cup was still in his hand.

“You’re still nursing that Bulletproof Coffee?” I asked him.

“Oh no,” he replied. “This one’s my fifth!”

We headed into some meetings together. And then, after about thirty minutes, he excused himself to use the bathroom. I didn’t see him again for the balance of the afternoon.

So, enjoy the Bulletproof. But ease your way in. With great power comes great responsibility.

With Friends Like These

Some excellent advice from Seth Godin:

You will benefit when you tell lots of people your give up goals. Tell your friends when you want to give up overeating or binging or being a boor. Your friends will make it ever more difficult for you to feel good about backsliding.

On the other hand, the traditional wisdom is that you should tell very few people about your go up goals. Don’t tell them you intend to get a promotion, win the race or be elected prom king. That’s because even your friends get jealous, or insecure on your behalf, or afraid of the change your change will bring.

Here’s the thing: If that’s the case, you need better friends.

A common trait among successful people is that they have friends who expect them to move on up.

Excellence is a Habit

“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”
-Aristotle

Fitness is complicated. (And, as I’ve said before, it’s composite.) There’s lots to get right, an almost endless array of things to consider. But as with most of life, the Pareto Principle, the 80/20 rule, applies. While getting to ‘perfect’ requires tweaking on all fronts, the crucial twenty percent is mostly common sense. The vast majority of us could improve just by doing simple things we already know we should be doing: moving more; exercising hard a few times a week; eating more vegetables and less processed crap.

Of course, none of that is news. So it’s not a knowledge gap that holds us back. Instead, it’s an action gap. We know we should do one thing, really mean to do it, but then do a completely different thing instead.

So how do we bridge that action gap? The usual answer: willpower. We make New Years resolutions, and plan to try harder. We get motivated, and determine to get things done. But decades of research have shown that approach just doesn’t really work. Leaning on willpower is physiologically taxing, and willpower itself is finite. It fades over the course of the day, and eventually wears out. After which we resort back to our old, poor choices. To put is succinctly, behaviors that depend solely on willpower are eventually doomed.

Instead, the more effective approach is to focus on our habits. While building new habits initially takes willpower (and careful thought), too, once they’re baked in, they run on autopilot, regardless of how much or how little willpower and motivation we bring to bear. Consider learning to drive a car. In the beginning, it’s a herculean task, requiring consciously considering an almost impossibly large number of simultaneous variables. (Just ask my parents; when I was learning to drive, I couldn’t manage to spot stop signs while also wrangling the mechanics of the car, and nearly killed us several times by rolling straight through intersections. Sorry mom!) By now, however, driving has likely become a completely ingrained habit for you. One so simple it runs entirely in your unconscious mind. Perhaps you’ve gotten in your car to drive home, and then looked up a moment later to find you were there. You basically blacked out, as your conscious brain turned off, and your habit-based unconscious drove you home.

So, if habits are the answer, what do we know about them?

First, let’s dispense with a myth: that making a habit takes a month, or two weeks, or 90 days. Habits are wildly variable in the amount of time they take to permanently acquire, depending on complexity, emotional valance, and a slew of other factors. Consider also that we perform some habits many times more each day than others. Learning to floss is a once-daily choice. Whereas smoking is something that inveterate smokers do dozens of time in a single day, creating a much more deeply-furrowed behavioral rut.

Regardless, all habits are made up of three parts: a cue, the action, and a reward. The cue is something in ourselves or the environment that triggers the behavior. The action is the behavior itself. And then the reward is something, either intrinsic in the action or that reliably comes as a result, that reinforces the behavior continuing. All sustained habits have all three parts.

When people want to create (or change) a habit, they usually put all their focus on the action: I’ve decided to start going to the gym. But, in fact, the action itself is the least important of the three steps. To successfully create a habit, you need to focus most of your attention on the other two steps.

Let’s look at working out. How could you create a successful cue for that behavior?

Perhaps you can create a time-based cue, or a sequential dependency. “I work out at 6:00am in the morning.” “I work out as soon as I get up.” In my experience, those are both excellent cues. While it’s far more pleasant to work out in the evening, for most of us, it’s too easy to push off evening workouts today, and then tomorrow, and then forever. While I hate working out in the morning, it’s my usual approach, as I know that doing it then is the only way it reliably gets done.

You can also create an environmental cue for your morning work out. The night before, take your sneakers and your workout clothing, and lay them on the floor next to your bed. The next morning, you’ll literally have to step over them to get out of bed. Laying them out the night before also leverages a great trick from behavioral economics: we’re more likely to agree to do hard things in the future than we are to agree to do them right now. Evening you thinks, ‘I should go to the gym tomorrow!’ Morning you thinks, ‘I should go back to sleep.’ Putting your clothes out the night before, then, is a way to let your smarter evening self boss morning you into making better choices.

You can also maximize compliance by making your action small. If you want to start jogging in the morning, don’t shoot for a habitual 30-minute run. Just make the habit putting on your sneakers, walking out the door, and jogging a minimum of ten steps. Like with procrastinating work, the hardest part of most actions is starting them. Once you’re out the door and taking your ten steps, momentum usually carries people forward. But even on days that it doesn’t, by getting out the door and doing those ten steps, you’ll have still further strengthened your new habit. That makes getting out the door easier on future days, so you’re more likely to do so, and more likely to leverage momentum on some of those future passes.

Once you’re done, then you need to reward yourself. Sure, exercise kicks out endorphins, an intrinsic reward, and leads to self-reinforcing physical changes, a good extrinsic one. But in the beginning, when you’re first getting into shape, you mostly just feel like sweaty crap after you work out. So here’s a reward to consider: eat a piece of chocolate. I know, I know; that seems completely counter to the point of working out in the first place. But research backs up the idea. In one study, people who rewarded themselves with a piece of chocolate post-workout were 97% more likely to still be working out thirty days later. More interestingly, 80% of those people were still working out, even thought they’d already stopped eating the piece of reward chocolate. Eventually, the workouts became their own intrinsic reward, or had yielded enough external results to motivate people to keep going. But the chocolate, that clear early reward, was crucial in getting the habit booted up in the first place.

When it comes to building habits, it’s also far easier to piggyback on an existing one than it is to build a new one from scratch.

When people decide to go on a diet, they’ll often try to create a completely new meal plan from scratch, or follow something cribbed from the back of a diet book. Over even two weeks, the compliance with that kind of drastic habit change is abysmal.

However, research from a long-term Harvard study on diet showed that most people actually eat in highly patterned ways. On average, we each tend to eat the same twelve or so meals, over and over again. And we can build on that fact to create a new set of habits that’s likely to actually stick.

Here’s how:

First, draft up a list of your twelve repeated meals. Literally, sit down and write out a list on a piece of paper. (You may have ten or fifteen rather than precisely twelve; the principle applies regardless.) Perhaps you buy a turkey sandwich from that place around the corner some days for lunch, while on other days you order General Tso’s from the same Chinese place on Seamless.

Then, one meal at a time, pull up the menu for the place from which you order, or a recipe related to something you already cook, and try to sketch out a new habitual meal that’s slightly healthier. You can do this iteratively, improving your choices over time, so you don’t have to go crazy right away. For your Chinese order, for example, you might replace your fried General Tso’s with chicken with snow peas, swap the included egg roll appetizer for a cup of won ton soup instead. Sure, you can do better still; but it’s a huge step in the right direction, effortlessly reducing 400 calories in a single meal.

Do that for all twelve of your standard meals, and then carry on your life pattern per usual, simply ordering or cooking the incrementally better alternatives each time instead. The effects compound quickly, and, having tried this with a slew of people, long-term compliance is through the roof.

To recap: habits are super important, and better health depends on making better habits. So give your habits real thought. Consider how to improve the ones you lean on now, and how to build new beneficial ones in ways that are likely to really stick. Getting guidance from people who know about health and habits can help hugely. As can getting support from peers and coaches along the way. But once those new habits are created, they’ll run on auto-pilot. They’re highly durable, and over the long haul will add up do substantial, sustainable results.

Iterate

For years, I’ve been a fan of British productivity guru Mark Forster, sort of the UK equivalent of David Allen.

Unlike Allen, who’s pedantically determined to prove that his Getting Things Done system is The One True Way, Forster instead tends to play around with a variety of systems, tools and approaches, always searching out new ways of getting more important things done more easily.

From Forster, I picked up a writing trick that remains one of my most used tools: iterative expansion drafting.

The approach is simple. You start by jotting or typing out very fragmentary ideas, roughing out the piece. For the start of this blog post, it might be something like:

Following Mark Forster, UK David Allen.

Open to new ideas.

From Forster: iterative expansion.

Start with fragments, expand in passes.

Using this kind of framework, you can get thoughts out quickly, focus on what you want to say before you become mired in how you want to say it.

Then, after a break, you can come back and expand a bit:

For years, I’ve been a fan of Mark Forster. He’s sort of the UK’s answer to David Allen.

He’s open to new ideas, and tends to play around with a variety of tools and approaches.

One technique I took from Forster was the concept of successive iterative drafting.

The concept is simple: start with words and sentence fragments to get out the ideas, then return repeatedly to the document to expand and edit those fragments on subsequent passes.

From there, another pass or two yields a publishable post.

Without this approach, especially when creating dense work documents, I tend to spend an inordinate amount of time stuck drafting and re-drafting the first paragraph. But going iteratively, I can flesh out the spine of a two-thousand word white-paper in just a few minutes. And with each successive expansion, momentum carries me forward. I’m no longer forced to come up with ideas from scratch, not faced with the terror of the blank page. Instead, I’m simply adding to what already exists, and then phrasing and rephrasing in clearer, more readable ways.

At it’s core, successive iterative drafting is the concept of ‘shitty first drafts’ taken to its logical extreme: creating a draft so shitty, it barely even resembles writing, yet that still gets you an initial foothold from which to build.

For more on the approach (and a bunch of other excellent insights), check out Forster’s Do it Tomorrow. It’s the book I’ve gifted more than any other, and it’s certainly worth the read.

Accumulate / Disperse

Recently, I’ve been reading The Book of Life, an online philosophy textbook by The School of Life. In short, the book is about “developing emotional intelligence through the help of culture.” As they put it:

We address such issues as how to find fulfilling work, how to master the art of relationships, how to understand one’s past, how to achieve calm and how better to understand, and where necessary change, the world. You will never be cornered by dogma, but we will direct you towards a variety of ideas from the humanities – from philosophy to literature, psychology to the visual arts – ideas that will exercise, stimulate and expand your mind.

Some of their content is stronger than other parts. But, if nothing else, it’s given me considerable food for thought.

This weekend, I read their article on “What Good Business Should Be.” It argues, among other points, that we should do good through accumulation, rather than just through dispersal:

The standard trajectory of philanthropy is: acquire a fortune by rigorous means and then disperse it to good causes. Plutocrats like Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick or Andrew Mellon made money in so-called ‘low’ areas of the economy like coal mining, railways, abattoirs, and packing factories – areas where you squeeze costs as tightly as you can and are always looking to reduce benefits as much as possible. However, once the money is in the bank, these rich people wholeheartedly turn their attention to ‘higher’ causes – among which art (and all that it celebrates, like kindness, beauty and tenderness) looms especially large.

It’s not ideal to ignore the higher needs of mankind for many decades while pulling together an astonishing fortune and then, later in life, suddenly to rediscover these higher needs via an act of immense generosity towards some localised little shrine of art (an opera house or a museum). Would it not be better and truer to the values underlying many works of art, to strive throughout the course of one’s life, especially within the money-generating day-job, to make kindness, tenderness, sympathy and beauty more alive and real in the world?

Tantalisingly and tragically, the difference between beauty and ugliness, goodness and cruelty is in most enterprises a few percentage points of profit. Therefore, for the sake of just a tiny bit of surplus wealth, wealth that isn’t strictly even needed, human life is daily being degraded and sacrificed.

It would be more humane if rich business people agreed to sacrifice a little of their surplus wealth in their main area of activity and in the most vigorous period of their lives, in order to render the workplace more noble and humane – and then bothered less with dazzling displays of artistic philanthropy in their later decades?

What we’re asking for is enlightened investment where a lower return is sought on capital in the name of Kindness and Goodness. There would be less fancy art at the end of it, but the values within works of art would be far more widely spread across the earth. The true test is how much goodness is done in the process of accumulation.

In the real world, the most effective philanthropists seem to embody the accumulate-then-disperse model. Consider Bill Gates, who in his Microsoft days was a step away from Monty Burns, yet who now runs arguably the most impactful nonprofit in history. And, on the other side, companies like Tom’s. Sure, they donate a pair of shoes for each pair they sell. But I often suspect that the net result is a large marketing boost, but only a very small external positive impact. It’s good through accumulation, sure, but a rather limited good.

Still, business good by accumulation is a different thing when it permeates every aspect of operations, rather than being simply bolted on the side of each purchase. Companies whose products or services themselves actually make consumers’ lives better, while also providing a livable wage to the employees – domestically and abroad – throughout their business and supply-chain.

For that kind of good business, the real driver remains in the hands of consumers. You can buy ethically-raised, locally-sourced beef, for example, that’s far healthier than factory-farmed steaks, and supports a sustainable nearby farm business, rather than a global food-manufacturing consortium. But most of us would rather save a few dollars at the register, even if we know the cheaper beef hurts us and our world more than the pricier farm-raised option. So, as The School of Life argues, there’s real need for education, for making consumers think more about their choices. Which, at some level, is what the Book of Life is about itself.

As I said, I don’t agree with everything I’ve read thus far. But I don’t begrudge the time spent reading any of it. Consider checking it out.

Out of the Blue

Five years back, I wrote about F.lux, a free piece of software that reduces the blue light emitted from your computer screen at night.  I still use F.lux today, and I’m even more convinced now of its importance.

Your brain perceives blue-spectrum screen light as daylight.  Just ten minutes of looking at your phone screen has the same impact as walking for an hour in bright daytime sun. Viewing that fake ‘daylight’ at night leads your body to mis-adjust your circadian rhythms, which in turn leads to large and lasting negative health impacts.

By now, most of us are more likely to spend the evening staring at smartphone screens than computers.  But while apps like Twilight have followed F.lux’s lead on Android, there hasn’t been a similar solution for iPhones and iPads.

Fortunately, Apple has taken the matter into their own hands. Their next system update contains a feature called Night Shift, that cuts the screens’ blue-spectrum light at night.  The final release of that update is still a month off.  But it’s stable enough that Apple has just released a public beta.

It is, indeed, a beta. I haven’t had any problems with it myself, though your mileage may vary.  If you choose to install it, back up your iPhone first.  That way, you can roll back if the install turns out to be a disaster.

But, as I said, it’s worked without a hitch for me thus far.  And the new Night Shift feature makes it more than worth the chance, especially if you’re an evening iPhone reader.

You can download the public beta for free, directly from Apple.  (After you do, you’ll still need to turn on Night Shift in Settings.) And then you can get an excellent, light-unimpeded night of sleep.

 

The Blog also Rises

Thinking about writing apps, here’s another one I’ve been leaning on of late: Hemingway.  Available as both a free website and a (paid) OS X app, this one comes in handy during the editing phase.

Paste in text, and Hemingway grades the readability of what you’ve written.  It highlights words, phrases and sentences that reduce comprehension.  It marks adverbs you might want to drop.  And it flags use of the passive voice.   All to help you make your writing more forceful and clear.

Left to my own devices, I tend to favor sentences built as overly-long, clause-filled constructions, those that wedge multiple thoughts together in a single, unnecessarily commingled whole.  Like that last sentence, for example. According to Hemingway: “very hard to read.”

So, after writing a shitty first draft, I next hop to Hemingway to slim things down.  Highlighted section by highlighted section, I tweak away.  Trimming the fat, subdividing messy sentences into clearer, shorter ones.  The result: better writing that’s far easier to understand.  And that makes a big difference.  Especially on screen, where comprehension is already reduced as compared to paper.  And on the web, where people scan as much as actually read.

Try it yourself.  And, while you’re at it, have a stiff drink.  It’s what Hemingway himself would want you to do.

Can’t Stop Won’t Stop

As I mentioned in a prior post, I’ve been thinking a lot of late about Cal Newport’s excellent new book, Deep Work.  In it, Cal argues for the power of being able to focus hard on a single difficult task for an extended period of time.

Cal proposes a slew of ideas to help push towards that goal. But I’ve also been collecting tools that help nudge me in that direction. A lot of my own deep work is writing-related.  And for me, the hardest part of writing is just getting the words down in the first place.  So I need to force myself to bang out shitty first drafts.  Otherwise, I end up critiquing and editing, or stare at the blank screen.

Enter the excellent app Flowstate.  And the recently-launched free website The Most Dangerous Writing App. Both do the same simple yet powerful thing: they delete what you’ve written if you stop writing.

In either app, you choose a time frame for which you have to keep moving – five minutes, twenty.  And then you start typing. And you keep typing. You pour stuff out, good, bad or ugly. Because if you stop for more than five seconds, everything you’ve written fades away.  It disappears forever into the digital abyss.

It sounds a bit ridiculous. And, perhaps, it is. But it’s also just enough fire beneath my feet to keep me moving.  Sure, I need to edit the hell out of what I create. And it may not be your best bet for drafting poetry. But when I need to just get things on paper (or screen), to create a starting point, it’s an awesome tool.

Try them out, and see if living on the edge a bit helps you, too.