Summer is fattening. Don’t do it in winter:
• There is a natural rhythm of the body regarding daily nutrition. The simplest way to stay synchronized is to eat only when the sun is out. This takes care of the day to day, but what about seasons of the year?
• Start with this post from Bill Lagakos, PhD, author, researcher, and formidable Twitter presence. Covered in great detail in Lights Out (awesome book with sadly no updated edition since 2001), the natural annual rhythm of food consumption has become distorted. See the first graph in the post. During the Winter, metabolic rate is lowest. Historically, humans (like most animals) would also have had lowest food intake during the winter, causing body mass to drop from its Autumn peak to its nadir in early Spring.
• The post gets into precise melatonin and prolactin cycles. But the overall message is straightforward: just as we have perpetual daytime, we also have perpetual summer, and it is making us eat too much.
How do you do it?
• Cool piece from NEJM from a pediatric oncologist on the question he is often asked at parties. Sometimes psychosocial support is our medicine, our procedure for helping people. • “I can do this work because talking is our procedure. It’s not so bad being me because it’s our responsibility to minimize parental regret. I can return to work every day because sometimes all we have to offer is radiation and kindness.”
Antilibrary:
•Umberto Eco doesn’t have a library, he has an antilibrary. Because home libraries should be about gaining knowledge, not showing off, one should have far more unread books than read. • “The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books.”
• I love the menacingly part. Definitely feel intimidated by the overflowing “to be read next” bookshelf. • Also check out brain pickings if you haven’t yet. Every one of Maria Popova’s posts open doors to numerous other books and ideas.
Apple Satire:
• Tim Ferriss sent a link to this somewhat old video. If you can watch this without laughing out loud, something is wrong. Truth about the pervasive problem of dongles.
Coddling of the American Mind:
• 100 pages into a new book by Jonathan Haidt (and Greg Lukianoff). The premise (American [college] kids are being intellectually overprotected) rests on 3 main pillars of bad advice:
1. What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker
2. Always trust your feelings
3. Life is a battle between good people and bad people
• These “Great Untruths” fulfill three criteria of bad advice: contradict ancient wisdom, contradict modern psychological research on well-being, and harm individuals and communities who embrace them. More to come in next week’s PofW.
Quote: Don’t do it in winter = turn out the lights and go keto. Bill Lagakos
