Apr 3
My sleep and workout time trumped my writing time this morning, so with just a few minutes to post, I thought I’d share something that I’ve loved ever since I read it for the first time a few years ago. It’s a short piece of advice from Tina Fey with a big message: “lead her [toward] something where she can make her own hours but still feel intellectually fulfilled and get outside sometimes and not have to wear high heels.” Read more
Mar 13
I read a Pando Daily blog post a few weeks ago that really resonated. It was about one of the media’s favorite topics these days – Sheryl Sandberg’s release of Lean In and launch of http://leanin.org/ (don’t worry, this isn’t about the raging debate about women in the workplace, I promise). Among other great arguments, in a funny and direct and real way, author and entrepreneur Sarah Lacy doles out her own advice to young women trying to figure it all out: “don’t listen too much to any advice.” She makes the refreshing point that each of us has a different life. Our VERY OWN TOTALLY UNIQUE life. We have different skills and different financial situations and different partners and different children and different challenges and different successes and different needs and different priorities. “Having it all” does not mean the same thing to every woman (how could it? we’re not robots), so maybe the most important question to focus on is what it means for each of us to “have it all,” and what we need to do to make that happen. Read more
Mar 1
What if your morning commute took you past billboards bearing cool ideas and inspirational thoughts and beautiful pictures instead of ads trying to sell your more stuff? And what if these billboards and bus stops inspired you to move and love and call your mom instead of eat junk food and buy things you don’t really need? Read more
Feb 22
Napa, California is the Happiest City in America…According to 10 Million Tweets (via The Atlantic)
The Vermont Complex Systems Center created a “hedonometer” – an analysis of 10 million geotagged tweets. The researchers coded each tweet for its happy/sad content, based on the appearance and frequency of specific words (happy = rainbow, love, beauty, hope, wonderful, wine…sad = damn, boo, ugly, smoke, hate, lied). Yes, this method lacks context (i.e., does wine mean happiness or drunkenness), but at this scale, researchers can make reasonable conclusions. There are some other concerns with the study, which The Atlantic does a good job of distilling (check out the article to learn more), but all in all, this is an interesting addition to the host of happiness data out there, and I’ll be excited to see where it goes. If you like this sort of thing, you might also be interested in a friend of mine’s project + beautiful book: We Feel Fine.
WAT-AAH Aims to Make Water Cool for Kids (via PSFK.com)
Mom and former marketing exec Rose Cameron makes a big bet that kids indeed judge a book by its cover. Her new brand WAT-AHH is designed to appeal to kids, giving them a reason to reach for water instead of sugary soda. Everything from the name to the bottle shape to the logo is designed by (her) kids, for kids, giving this a good shot if her hypothesis is true. Her own kids sure think it is: “Honestly, I think that my friends would rather drink a water that looks cooler than soda because it’s all about looking cool, honestly.” My take? Any effort to get kids off soda and onto water is a good one…but I’d also love to see a generation of kids drinking of the tap instead of plastic bottles!
Foods Might Have More Calories Than Food Labels Tell Us (via The Guardian)
Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham convened a session about calorie measurement at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) this week to voice his concerns that our current system of measuring calories (known as the Atwater system) may be flawed. He’s concerned that the system doesn’t account for the calories in fiber, while it overestimates (by up to 20%) the number of calories in some protein-rich food. Additionally, raw and cooked versions of the same food may have different calorie content. It will be interesting to see where this goes, as the thought of a new labeling system feels overwhelming (to me). In the meantime, this is a good reminder to eat whole, real foods in moderate quantities rather than obsess about calories (unless there is a medical reason we need to)!
Outdoor Exercise Trumps Indoor Workouts (via The New York Times)
As someone who grew up and lived in a cold climate for much of my life, I’ve long wondered whether exercising indoors (on machines) gives us the same benefit as exercising outdoors. Gretchen Reynolds reported this week that there are irreplaceable benefits to exercising outdoors. Here are the key differences she reports: 1) Runners stride differently (more ankle flexion, more variety) and burn more calories when running outdoors versus on a treadmill, 2) cyclists use more energy outside (in large part due to wind drag), 3) walkers reported higher measures of vitality, enthusiasm, pleasure and self-esteem after walking outside versus indoors, and 4) overall, people who exercise outdoors exercised longer and more often than those working out indoors.
At the end of her article, Reyonds quotes Jackqueline Kerr, profession at the University of California, San Diego: “Despite the fitness industry boom, we are not seeing changes in national physical activity levels, so gyms are not the answer.” It’s easy for me to say, now that I’ve escaped frigid Wisconsin for temperate California, but it sounds like the message is clear: LET’S GET OUTSIDE.
Body Chemistry Might Explain Differences Between Couch Potatoes and Exercisers (via The Wall Street Journal)
So it turns out that working out might not just be about motivation and determination after all…biology might play a significant role. According to Panteleimon Ekkekakis, professor of kinesiology at Iowa State, everyone has a different physical capacity for exertion, after which point we start to feel really crummy during exercise. Knowing that we’re not all created equal, Ekkekakis sees people pushing beyond their natural limits too soon, versus trying to boost these limits slowly over time. This huge variance in thresholds might explain why some people exercise easily and stick with it, while others struggle and burn out. So what’s the big takeaway? Make workouts achievable, build slowly, and find ways to make exercise fun + social.
Feb 15
Marriage Reappraisal –> Marital Satisfaction (via Northwestern University News Center)
Just in time for Valentine’s Day, psychologists from Northwestern and Stanford published a study showing the benefits of relationship reappraisal in protecting marriages. It sounds wonky, but the concept of reappraisal is overwhelmingly simple: it’s the ability to observe a phenomenon as if from a distance or neutral perspective. Here’s the 21-minute (per year) intervention participants did…
Every four months for a year, participants were asked to take seven minutes to think about the biggest disagreement they had experienced with their spouse during the last four months. They were then asked to write about it from three different angles:
And bingo, study participants reported better feelings of love, intimacy, trust, passion and commitment than their non-reappraising counterparts. Worth 21 minutes a year? I vote yes.
Four Workouts Might Just Be the Magic Number (via The New York Times)
photo by fang guo, via flickr creative commons
Gretchen Reynolds from The New York Times reported on a study published this month in Exercise & Science in Sports & Medicine. The study investigated 72 older, sedentary women and randomly assigned them to three exercise groups: 2 workouts/week, 4 workouts/week, and 6 workouts/week. While all three groups gained strength and endurance and lost body fat, the 4X/week group expended more energy (burned more calories per day) than the 2X/week group and the 6X/week group. Why the difference? Researchers concluded that the 6X/week participants were more likely to spend their non-exercise time sitting and resting than the other groups. So what’s the net takeaway? Exercise as much as you can and want to if you can keep your energy levels high through the day (avoid getting tired or slow). But if you find yourself getting lazy after workouts, it might be worth it to dial back total weekly workouts and walk/bike/move more in your everyday life!
Marcus Antebi Aims to Own Juicing Category (via Well + Good NYC)
photo by plasticrevolver via flickr creative commons
Juicing and cleansing are all the rage right now, and the founder of Juice Press, Marcus Antebi, wants to be out in front. A former Thai boxer, Antebi has expanded from one store in New York City’s East Village in 2010 to what will be 10 by the end of this spring. Beyond opening stores, he’s out preaching about nutrition, “saving New Yorkers from dairy-induced digestion issues and Five Guys food comas,” as Well + Good NYC reported. He’s got big ambitions, but he’s going up against Starbucks’ Evolution Fresh. And at $60/day, the benefits of his juice better be as loud as his marketing campaign if he’s going to own the category.
Fast Company reporter Austin Carr covers Nike’s digital future in this month’s “Most Innovative Companies” issue. Parker shares clues about how Nike will catapult out of apparel to broaden its offerings to include tech, data and services. It’s going to encourage start-ups to build on the Nike+ platform, and if FuelBand usage continues to increase, it will have tons of data to help motivate people wearing the sleek black device. Nike and Parker are dreaming big: “Just imagine if your body could control or change the music that you’re listening to–if your movement could actually change the cadence of the music, the tempo, or the beat.” From my perspective, the coolest part about these goals is the potential for Nike to transform itself from a shoe company to a wellness machine. Time will tell…
Mountain Dew for Breakfast (eeeeeew) (via Huffington Post)
Pepsi pushed the unhealthy breakfast to a new limit Tuesday, announcing a new breakfast drink called Kickstart. It tastes like Mountain Dew but is made with 5 percent juice, vitamins B and C, and caffeine. According to Pepsi’s research, the drink emerged from market research saying that Mountain Dew fans “didn’t see anything that fit their [morning drink] needs.” My take? A little more caffeine in the shape of something real (coffee or tea) beats a can full of chemicals any day. Just when I thought the end of soda might be nearer, it’s positioning itself at the breakfast table. [Sigh]
This is a new type of post I’m trying out, since I find myself coming across too many interesting things during the week to cover them all in depth. I catalogue them as I see them and then write a Friday digest. What do you think of this format? Helpful? Too long? Too short? Too recycled? I’d love any feedback!
photo by kuster & wildhaber photography via flickr creative commons
I took a 14-hour flight earlier this week and am staring down the return early next. I love flying…I love meeting random people on planes and working/reading without interruption and knowing that I’m either going somewhere or going home and realizing how amazing it is that humankind has evolved to a place where we go to sleep in San Francisco and wake up in Sydney. But, I really don’t like sitting for hours on end, breathing stale air ,and worrying whether the water the flight attendants are serving is going to kill me. Don’t get me wrong, the benefits of getting on planes far outweigh these little nits of mine. But, why not optimize our flights to be the very healthiest they can be? Read more
We are entering the month of love – a month when red and pink abound, heart-shaped goodies show up in bakery windows, flower sales spike, and restaurants dim the lights a little bit more. I’m not into the Hallmark-y, dozen-roses-on-the-table manifestation of love, but I am into the idea of manifesting love in lots of different ways, not just in February, but every day. Outward expressions of love come in countless shapes and sizes…so, kicking February off right, here are a few examples I’d like to share: Read more
Dec 31
New Year’s Eve is a special time. Although I’m not into staying up until the wee hours to see the clock turn twelve, I am into the bigger-picture optimism and hope and anticipation and motivation that come with the imminent arrival of a clean slate.
I obviously like and believe in goals and the daily practices that are part of achieving them (after all, this is what wellfesto is all about). But I recently found out that everyone thinks about their aspirations differently, and for many, goals are a really private matter. I conducted a survey a few months ago, and learned from my relatively small (70-person) sample that Read more
Dec 12
Today is my birthday. I love birthdays for lots of reasons, but mostly because they punctuate time, bridging the past with ideas about and hopes for what the next year might bring.
This year, I’m making a big commitment: I’m launching this site and aiming to post 260 times (every single weekday) between now and my next birthday. Read more
Learning from parenting and life, while trying to get dinner on the table
A quixotic quest for the bright side.
don't sweat the baby stuff
by SBK & Associates
hacking health, designing life
Rudey's Room
Posts with strategies and tactics on building great products and how to be a better leader
Tim Ferriss is the author of five #1 New York Times bestsellers and host of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast.
hacking health, designing life
Marginalia on our search for meaning.
hacking health, designing life
wellfesto 