Archive for August, 2006
Wow. Advanced sleep deprivation can make you feel like a character in a Franz Kafka story, or conversely, like a drunken sailor wearing a muumuu while eating peach melba in a Kenny Rodger’s Roaster on the moon.
Or something like that.
Anyway, I’ve been working very intently on the premier episode of the Health Hacks Podcast, of which I am both producer and host. I have a great stable of contributors with whom I am proud to be associated.
Conceptualizing, creating and editing the show has left me working nearly 21 hours a day for two weeks. Tomorrow the completed episode will be posted at iTunes and various other great places and you can hear the fruits of our collective labor.
Then, I collapse and sleep for 2 straight days.
I hope that posting here will become more regular in the next few days.
Best health,
-Kevin Kennedy-Spaien
August 29th, 2006
Have you heard of either Parkour or Free Running yet?
These two related but different disciplines are (cue the oxymoron police) “popular underground sports” originating in france and the U.S. respectively. They involve running at top speed over distance without skirting any obstacles. I’m not talking about on a high-school track with hurdles, but an urban cityscape filled with moving cars and inconveniently placed buildings.
The trend began in France with the Traceurs, or practitioners of Parkour. Eventually the sport forked into standard Parkour, concerned with simplicity of motion in getting from A to B, and Free Running, which places a value on aesthetic interpretation and artistry. Both are breathtaking to watch- and very dangerous.
I’m going to throw out a few links here, but what you really need to do is go to this YouTube search results page and have a look. You’d swear these people were stunt doubles for Hidden Dragon Crouching Tiger!
Read more:
Parkour [Wikipedia]
Parkour.com
American Parkour
August 17th, 2006
While I was researching for the newest Fat Guy Gets Fit podcast (now available here) I came across two great little articles with exercise advice geared for the less-experienced among us.
First, WikiHow has a great page outlining a strategy for developing six-pack abs. The article addresses toning exercises, fat loss, nutrition and medical concerns.
Next, WebMD offers an article entitled The Top 20 Fitness Mistakes Beginners Make. This covers issues with cardio, flexibility, maintaining a routine, and sins of omission
Read More:
How to Get Six Pack Abs
The Top 20 Fitness Mistakes Beginners Make
August 17th, 2006
This is not medical advice. It is a true chronicle of what I did and my observations, but I am in no way recommending that you do the foolish, foolish things I did.
I am a musician, primarily a bass player. My fingers are very important to me in this regard, as you can imagine.
Several months ago, I developed a pesky wart (or “veruca”, as the Brits apparently call them) near the very tip of my left index finger. This made playing actually impossible in any meaningful way.
My new friend, Warty, was not a typical wart, but actually was mostly beneath skin level. Usually warts like that are called Plantar warts, and usually they are only found on the soles of feet. In fact, I don’t know if the term Plantar can be properly applied to a non-footaceous wart.
I went to the pharmacy to find a solution to my problem. In the past, I had used salicylic acid (in the Compound W brand) to treat warts, but when I looked on the bottle, the directions stipulated that it would take months to do the job. That wasn’t going to do it for me, no way.
Nowadays, I learned, you can do wart-freezing at home with a handy little kit sold over the counter. I tried that, but after five tries, found that it was doing exactly nothing.
Back to the topical medicine.
Determined to save a buck, I bought a generic brand of salicylic acid and started using it. Progress was very slow, but I noticed eventually that micro-fine layers of tissue on and around Warty were dying and with a bit of work, could be pulled/scraped away.
I settled into a routine of debriding the wart with a sterile exacto blade, soaking in hot water, then applying the medicine two to three times a day. Occasionally I would draw blood, but wart tissue isn’t very vascular so the medicine would stop the bleeding quickly. Oh, and it STUNG.
While this method is not for the faint of heart, or the particularly intelligent, it cut my wart-removal time down to under two weeks. Your Mileage May Vary.
August 11th, 2006
Hey! Today is my birthday. Why should you care? You shouldn’t.
BUT…
Also today Health-Hack.com is 164 hits away (11:00 AM Boston Time) from hitting the magic 100,000 page views mark. I would love to see that happen today. There are really only two ways that will happen, though: one would be for a major site to link to me today, and I’m not holding my breath (that usually happens about once a month, and I’m not due for a couple weeks I reckon).
The other way is if all of you reading the RSS feed (and there are a ton of you!) were to click over and read on the site. I realise that this is pure vanity on my part, but simply put, I ain’t proud. Here, I’ll make it easy click here: http://www.Health-Hack.com/
I promise an actual value-added post later today!
Update: Apparently StumbleUpon is favoring Health-Hack.com mightily today! Wee!
August 11th, 2006
You have most likely noticed over the last several weeks that I’ve been discussing the exciting things on the horizon at Grasshopper New Media. I’ve discussed my involvement with the Fat Guy Gets Fit podcast, and now I’d like to let you know what is happening with that in the immediate future.
First off, FGGF#13 is up at www.fatguygetsfit.com and Chris does a review of Health-Hack.com. (Yay Chris!).
Now starting next week with FGGF#14, we will start to bring on the other contributors to what will eventually be called “The Health Hacks Podcast”. The new show will feature segments from Fat Guy and Health-Hack.com, as well as contributions from other health writers from around the web.
We don’t have all the people we need, yet, so please let me know if you want to join in the mayhem. At this point, the Health Hacks Podcast Posse consists of:
Chris Brogan
Jimmy Moore
Reinhard Engels
Kevin Kennedy-Spaien
In several weeks, the final switch will be tripped and the Health Hacks podcast will get its own website at
www.HealthHacksPodcast.com. We will be subscribable through iTunes or your favorite RSS reader. Stay Tuned, it is going to be a wild ride.
EDIT: The site is live now. www.HealthHacksPodcast.com.
August 10th, 2006
Standard Podcast [23:34m]: | Play in Popup | Download
EDIT: StumbleUpon visitors, please consider looking around! Try our home page!
Wendy at Lifehacker.com points to this Steven Gillman article on managing worry effectively. It fits in with the GTD theme I’ve had running through my mind this week, so I am glad to reproduce the original article in full (with permission from ezinearticles.com):
We all worry at times, and there is probably no way to stop worrying forever. There are some specific ways to stop right now, however. The following tips on how to stop worrying come from experience, because I’ve always been a bit of a worrier, and I had to learn some good techniques for stopping this energy-sucking habit. Here are five of the best.
1. Take action now. Any action towards a goal tends to diminish worry. Thinking too much about your goals or plans, especially if you dwell on the hurdles, will cause you worry and stress. Of course you should plan well, but when planning drifts towards worrying, it’s time to start doing something positive. Take action!
2. Make decisive decisions. When you want to stop worrying too much about an unresolved issues, you need to make decisive decisions, and even bad decisions may be better than doing nothing. Often you will immediately resolve the stress when you, for example, finally decide to quit that job, buy that house, or make that phone call. Nothing crowds and clouds your mind with worry as much as decisions waiting to be made. Make them now, or at least start gathering the information you need to make them. If they prove to be bad decisions, just make new ones.
3. Use mental categories. Too many things going on in your head? Put them on lists and you may feel better. It works well for many of us worriers. When you are dwelling too much on something, and you stop to schedule a time to work on it, or just put it on a list, it is easier to let go of it for now. Jot down that phone call you have to make on tomorrow’s list, and you’ll feel less worried now. You’re basically creating “mental categories.” In fact, just saying to yourself, “There’s nothing I can do about this until Monday,” can put a worry into a category of “nothing to worry about right now.”
4. Deal with problems directly and quickly. To eliminate worry when there are real problems, try to confront them head-on, and resolve them quickly. I once had to sue someone over a business matter, and I was worrying about it for weeks. When I finally just filed the papers, got on the phone, and came to an agreement, my stress was gone. Actually, my worrying began to dissipated as soon as I started acting, BEFORE the resolution (See #1).
There is more mental pain and worry in anticipating problems than in the problems themselves. If you lost a thousand dollars in the stock market last year, you probably suffer less from that today than you would from wondering if you’ll make it on time to a concert you paid $50 for. The anticipation of problems is what causes the most worry. Just deal with them head on as soon as is possible, and resolve them to the extent possible.
5. Meditate to eliminate worry. Meditating is a great way to relax and to stop worrying, but what if you don’t have the time for more involved meditative practices? Don’t worry. Just try this: close your eyes, let the tension out of your body and take several deep breaths through your nose. That’s it. Want even easier meditation? Try brain wave entrainment CDs that do all the work for you. Just pop on the headphones and they’ll relax you by slowing your brain waves.
Try the above techniques. Make habits out of whichever ones work best to stop your worries. They need to be habits because nothing works if you forget to use it. In fact, until they become habitual, you may want to carry a list of your favorite techniques for eliminating worry.
Steve Gillman has been studying brainpower and related topics for years. For more on How To Increase Brain Power, and to get the Brain Power Newsletter and other free gifts, visit http://www.IncreaseBrainPower.com
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Steven_Gillman
August 10th, 2006
Diets are like religion.
[pause]
How did I mean that statement? Well, it is probably true in many respects — Insert your truism here — but I mean it in this way: people tend to belong to sects and cleave to them very tightly with a real zealot’s passion. Sometimes, too, people will bash other diets with a fundamentalist’s fervor.
Weight Watcher’s people (to pick an arbitrary example) may go around saying the most intolerant and rude things about Atkins Dieters. Atkins people (and I have been one) often denigrate and demean the low-fat lifestyle.
I firmly believe, as I have said before, that the diet that works is the one you stick to. Now, there are snake oil salesmen in the world, but their diets don’t work. You can probably guess in advance if a plan is something you believe in and feel you can stick to. If a diet isn’t working for you, you shouldn’t be sticking to it. Give it a chance, then move on.
Low carb really works. Low fat really works. Loads of people lose brilliantly on diets as diverse as the Beverly Hills diet (ugh - I could not stick to that one!) and the Shangri-La diet. Ultimately it comes down to commitment. But commitment alone won’t work if you choose a plan that is simply beyond your ability to follow.
If a diet story makes the front page of Digg or Slashdot, invariably, one of the very first comments is something along the lines of “Just eat less and exercise more, pigs!”.
Well, those people are coming from their paradigm, where exercise is already a part of their lives and they already have good eating habits - and fat people are bad, lazy, deluded people.
Those folks can really get dieters or people considering dieting steamed up. Particularly if we are thin-skinned. Ultimately, we know we need to ignore that unhelpful “insight” (for now, until we have the tools to enable us to eat less and exercise more). However, are you really any better at dealing with people who live outside of your weight-loss paradigm?
If your friend on plan x says they’ve reached a plateau in their weight loss, are you encouraging them to “stick with it”, or are you undermining their success by trying to convince them to “switch planes mid-flight”?
I think we might all benefit from taking a more detached, less passionate attitude about other people’s diet choices. That said, just like in religion, if you find a specific thing that works for you, there is a strong impulse to go evangelize. Tread lightly, friend.
What do you say? Am I off base? Let me know!
This post was inspired by:
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (I just began reading it)
and
Overjustification Effect Explains Away Religious Morality - Your motivation to exercise evaporates for the same reason many believe morality has a religious basis. (I take no stance on the issue, but it is an interesting read)
Technorati Tags: weight-loss, diet, morality, 7 habits
August 8th, 2006
The latest Fat Guy Gets Fit podcast has been released, so please check it out. My segment features health tips for desk jockeys.
Check it out and let us know what you think either here or at GNM!
Thanks!
Read More:
http://fatguygetsfit.com/
Subscribe:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/FatGuyGetsFit
August 7th, 2006
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