Month: March 2008

“Death is not sad; the sad thing is that most people don’t ever really live at all.” This is one of my favorite pieces of wisdom from Dan Millman’s Way of the Peaceful Warrior. Since I first read those words I have had the good fortune of talking to a few terminally ill people. If you’ve ever spoken to someone who knows they are going to die, you get the feeling that what they have to say is important.

In my article Sometimes Bad News is Good News I related my feelings surrounding a urine test that revealed protein – an indicator of kidney failure. The test turned out to be inaccurate so my life didn’t take the turn I thought it was going to but the experience impacted me. You gain a lot of insight into your life when you think that it is going to end.

I was lucky, my test was negative. Some people don’t have that good fortune and need to accept that their life IS going to end a lot sooner than they ever imagined. Last Lecture By Dying Professor contains a video about this subject. The video that is embedded at the top of the page contains a short version of Randy Pausch’s last lecture – this page contains the entire lecture and other information about Randy.

Eat Food. Not Much. Mostly Plants. A great article by T-nation author TC outlines 11 important rules for eating in the 21 century.

The farming world is very different now than it was 50 years ago and we are eating a bunch of food that didn’t really exist a couple generations ago. As a consequence our bodies are turning into temples of illness.

These new foods and the illnesses they cause are not isolated to humans. Cattle have had their diet of grass replaced with grain and corn feed.

Cattle don’t do well on grains. It makes them sick and they then require antibiotics. Furthermore, it changed the fatty acid content of their meat. Whereas normally the grass-fed creatures had omega-6/omega-3 fatty acid ratios more consistent with wild game or wild salmon, the corn-feeding turned them into hoofed heart attacks in waiting, the ingestion of which slowly clogged the nation’s arteries.

But we can now buy eggs that have been enriched with omega fatty acids to make up for the lower levels of these in beef – too bad for the chickens that their diet now contains food loaded with fatty acids. No doubt we’ll fix this by changing something else in the food chain.

3. Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle.

We all know this one. The periphery of the grocery store is lined with fresh food, food that rots, food that’s alive. Those are the most nutritious foods. Of course, the suggestion isn’t fool-proof as Go-Gurt Portable Yogurt is in the dairy case.

Rotting good, staying “fresh” for years in a box bad.

6. You are what you eat eats too.

As discussed earlier in this article, cows and sheep are meant to eat grass, not seeds. If they eat too many seeds, they get sick and require constant antibiotics.

A grass-based diet for farm animals means the meat, butter, or eggs you eat, along with the milk you drink, contains fewer omega-6 and saturated fats, as well as higher levels of vitamins and antioxidants.

9. Eat wild foods when you can.

Wild plants are richer in antioxidants than their domestic cousins. Since they have to defend themselves against pests and disease without the help of man, they had to get tough — develop a bevy of interesting and potentially healthful (to man) phytochemicals — to survive.

The rest of the rules are worth reading although they may make you somewhat cynical about our abilities to continue to fed ourselves.

I feel productive when I’m reading online. It feels like I’m learning. There is a sense that I’m doing something that will improve my life. It feels important.

I’ve talked to my friends about this and some of them report a similar feeling – if you are sitting in front of a computer reading or typing you MUST be doing something that is important. Facebook is as good an example this – it consumes a lot of time and feels like it is a worthwhile pursuit when you are doing it.

It turns out that we’re hardwired to seek out information because we find it rewarding. Lee Gomes’ Why We’re Powerless To Resist Grazing On Endless Web Data reveals some interesting new information about how the brain responsed to information.

Dr. Biederman first showed a collection of photographs to volunteer test subjects, and found they said they preferred certain kinds of pictures (monkeys in a tree or a group of houses along a river) over others (an empty parking lot or a pile of old paint cans).

The preferred pictures had certain common features, including a good vantage on a landscape and an element of mystery. In one way or another, said Dr. Biederman, they all presented new information that somehow needed to be interpreted.

When he hooked up volunteers to a brain-scanning machine, the preferred pictures were shown to generate much more brain activity than the unpreferred shots. While researchers don’t yet know what exactly these brain scans signify, a likely possibility involves increased production of the brain’s pleasure-enhancing neurotransmitters called opioids.

In other words, coming across what Dr. Biederman calls new and richly interpretable information triggers a chemical reaction that makes us feel good, which in turn causes us to seek out even more of it. The reverse is true as well: We want to avoid not getting those hits because, for one, we are so averse to boredom.

We are almost helpless when it comes to our need to bring in information. We are born junkies for things that make us think. My morning ritual of checking email, my blog reader, cnn.com and the weather network is a ritual because my brain pumps out the reward chemicals when I do it.

Does it do me any harm? I think so. In all honesty, I don’t think someone can consider themselves fully self-aware if they are addicted to chemicals; even if my brain is producing them, I’m still hooked.

I wouldn’t suggest that we stop using this reward mechanism to serve as the motivation for information seeking behaviors but I do suggest that we gain control over when we go looking for the fix and what we do to serve up that fix. Just because our brain rewards us for reading the latest celebrity gossip doesn’t mean that ingesting this information does anything to improve the quality of life.

Steve Pavlina’s The Most Direct Solution to Any Problem is a great article. He suggests that the best way to solve a problem is likely the most direct way to solve the problem.

Many problems will have multiple direct solutions, but often these solutions will be unsavory at first glance because they’ll require courage, self-discipline, creativity, or persistence to implement. But if we can somehow get ourselves to follow through, we know the solutions will actually work.

…Another example: Suppose you’re interested in starting a relationship with someone, but you don’t know how that person feels about you. One direct solution would be to simply walk up, explain your thoughts and feelings, and ask if s/he is interested in discussing the possibility of a closer relationship. This will take less than a minute to say, and regardless of the outcome, at least you know where you stand. Of course this solution may require a lot of courage to overcome the possibility of rejection, but it’s very simple and straightforward.

The article goes on to say that very often ones laziness or insecurity prevents them from taking the direct route, favoring instead the path of least resistance; which too often is doing nothing about the problem. But there is a saying that goes something like “if you have a problem and in three months you have the same problem, the problem is actually you.”