Thinking deep thoughts in Seattle
When teetering between the prospect of decades of poverty or, conversely, servitude as a lifelong student (still not sure what the difference is), I had to make some hard choices before my life got out of hand and I turned forty, still waiting for my career to start.
But before I get to attend networking events and participate in team-building exercises as an M.B.A. student (there we go, now it makes sense), I get the opportunity (again) to flirt shamelessly with standardized testing and middle-school math.
I just dropped over one-hundred dollars on test prep material – that’s not counting the toner and paper costs from printing online study prep materials – and in the process abused twenty acres of endangered South American rain forest I’m sure.
I hope the koalas were safe.
Since this all began about a week ago, it’s been a trifle odd. I’ve found a certain intrinsic pleasure in the repetition offered by standardized multiple-choice exams, resembling, in a way, my coffee addiction. It gives me some sense of satisfaction knowing I’ve developed a palette for rote memorization and a substance that tastes like bitter charcoal.
What surprised me is that while I haven’t studied for an exam like this in years, the methods I used during graduate school to study share the same principles as the methods I’m using right now. I thought readers might be interested in how I go about relearning methods and information.
For your perusal, I present The Definitive Guide to Studying.
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Mmm... words.
I love books. A lot. I wish I could read all of them and still feed myself enough food to stay conscious.
But I can’t, and should I seek to remain coherent and mobile – I do – I often find myself struggling with the need to produce content, and in the same breath give attention to the word-filled tomes occupying valuable desk real estate.
See what I mean?
I have friends and know of others who, after the first page, will finish a text regardless of its quality.
I lack that sort of patience My time is too valuable to waste on poorly researched, poorly argued, or quite simply, poorly written books. You would be surprised how many there are out there.
So when Jamie Hale, uber-fitness coach extraordinaire, sent me his book Knowledge and Nonsense: The Science of Nutrition and Exercise to review for my blog, I knew I was in for quite the ride.
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The catalyst for e-books - Apple iPad (Source: Wired.com)
Apple’s at it again. After much speculation and the usual hype leading up to an Apple product launch, the iPad is finally here.
Unlike the immediate universal acclaim received by its predecessors the iPhone and iPod Touch, Apple’s first foray into the realm of e-readers and tablets has merited quite the ambivalent response.
A number of people have asked me my thoughts on the iPad and what it may portend for the future of tech devices. In this post I weigh in on this curious, over-sized iPod and speculate who may be buying this sleek device that’s been gifted with a rather unfortunate name.
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Six years ago my only sartorial option was a forty-two slash forty-four stretch-pant husky pair of jeans. I was nineteen at the time, and if you couldn’t guess, this blog lead is code for, “I was really fat.” Within six months of my nineteenth birthday I dropped over one-third of my body weight through obsessive cardio and strict adherence to FDA dietary guidelines. Yes, the food pyramid does work if used correctly. I’m not saying it’s going to get you into cover model shape, hardly, but it will allow you to lose weight. So much for all the ado over carbohydrates and insulin blunting fat loss.
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If my gym is any indication, New Year’s resolutions are in full effect. I haven’t seen so many cardio machines occupied on a Sunday evening in quite some time. Actually, in about a year to be more exact about it. Even the weight room was pulsating with epic levels of brotitude. I should have snapped some photos.
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Photography by Emily C. McArthur
After a good dose of scientific inquiry we’re onto the meat of our program, literally. I touched on intermittent fasting in part two and here we’ll see how it fits into a Form Factor Nutrition program. FFN (may as well acronymize it at this point) takes a lesson from fixed-time scheduling and productivity and applies it to the world of nutrition.
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I am, of course, indebted to those who came before me. A big thank you goes out to Alan Aragon, Martin Berkhan, and Lyle McDonald for their help in crafting this article series.
Researching Reduced Meal Frequency
Any nutritional protocol that requires a reduction in meal frequency invokes its own unique set of costs and benefits. Prolonging the time your body stays in the post-fed or fasting state raises the hunger ceiling, so to speak, and would appear to be a damning blow against nutritional methodologies that utilize fasting protocols – who wants to be hungrier more often, right? Well, our bodies and brains being what they are, things aren’t quite that simple. Let’s begin with a discussion of meal frequency and its effect on appetite. Read More
Introduction
Finding the right nutrition plan is like finding the right lover, this article series offering a novel approach to just such an endeavor. It argues that there is no ‘right’ nutrition plan, because looking for the right nutrition plan is a fruitless pursuit, a waste of mental energy. Like love, the right nutrition plan should instead come to you, should fit you, should complement you and your personality and your life. I find it dispiriting that non-athletic populations now require eating agendas, veritable consumption itineraries in Excel as complex as an office work-chart, to see them to an admirable physique. It is to take something instinctive and biological and routinize it, to suck the joy from one of life’s simple luxuries. Form Factor Nutrition is my effort to restore the pleasure inherent in eating, to put the stick and rudder of nutrition in the hands of the people and wrest it from the grips of a distracted diet industry. Read More
1.
Today I want to talk about accomplishing the impossible: concurrent fat-loss and muscle-gain. There’s plenty of debate in the industry as to how fast this feat can be done and to what degree the body can vacillate between an anabolic (muscle-gaining) and a catabolic (fat-losing) state where the trainee continues to see progress. Certain strategies – intermittent fasting comes to mind – try to do this on a short, arguably daily time-line, while others like Lyle’s Ultimate Diet 2.0 push the time-line out to a week. Alan Aragon’s culking method is probably the least aggressive of the aforementioned, making its manipulations to a multi-week or monthly basis with moderate daily undulations of caloric intake.
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Ladies, I feel bad for you. Really, I do. When it comes to fitness marketing, women are preyed upon like helpless bunnies in a field brim-full of intimidating, roided-out personal trainers and professional salesmen. It’s as if fitness professionals go full-retard when presented with a female audience. Seriously, how many training programs do we need that tell its victims to do a bunch of cardio, some butt raises, and biceps curls with pink dumbbells?
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