Hey everyone! Well we made it to 2021. It is still the first Wednesday of the month. Quite a bit going on in the news today as of 10pm on January 6th. Wow. Usually we can rest assured that much of what we worry about won’t matter in a few years. But today’s events will show up in history books. Hopefully we can move forward as a country.
I hope you had a fulfilling holiday season. Here are some ideas for wellness practice this month.
How do you drink your coffee?
• Apparently filters matter. This study looked at >500,000 men and women in Norway and found that especially in older men, unfiltered coffee (espresso, French press, possibly K cups) for years correlates with more death from multiple causes. The diterpenes kahweol and cafestol appear to alter cholesterol in a harmful way; these compounds appear in 30x greater quantity when a paper filter is NOT used.
• Polyphenols in coffee can “inhibit oxidation of LDL, exert anti-thrombotic effects, and improve endothelial dysfunction.” So you do want to drink the coffee. Just use a filter. Did I brew coffee the other day though a reusable porous filter and then try to pour that through a paper filter into my mug? Maybe.
• Bottom Line: brewing coffee through a simple paper filter removes lipid-raising molecules and might lead to less risk of death.
Underrated Paul McCartney
• Check out this article on 64 reasons to celebrate Paul McCartney. I am not huge Beatles fan. I have always liked much of their music, but this article gave me a new appreciation for the Beatles catalog and Paul McCartney’s genius. Author Ian Leslie’s is so articulate in his description of music, lyrics, etc. Here is a summary from Tyler Cowen:
Paul has been writing songs and performing since 1956, with no real breaks. Perhaps he has written more hit songs than anyone else. He brought the innovations of Cage and Stockhausen into popular music, despite having no musical education and growing up in the Liverpool dumps. His second act, Wings, sold more records in its time than the Beatles did. On a lark he decided to learn techno/EDM and put out five perfectly credible albums in that area. He decided to learn how to compose classical music, and after some initial missteps his Ecce Cor Meum is perhaps the finest British choral work in a generation, worthy of say Britten or Nicholas Maw. And that is from a guy who can’t really read music. He has learned how to play most of the major musical instruments, typically well. He can compose and play and perform in virtually every musical genre, including heavy metal, blues, music hall, country and western, gospel, show tunes, ballads, rockers, Latin music, pastiche, psychedelia, electronic music, Devo-style robot-pop, drone, lounge, reggae, and more and more and more. His vocal range once spanned over four octaves, he is sometimes considered the greatest bass player in the history of rock and roll, and he was the first popular musician to truly master the recording studio, again with zero initial technical or musical education of any sort. He is perhaps the quickest learner the music world ever has seen.
Freedom at Night
• David Perell is a solid person to follow on Twitter where he posts about writing and business. This one was cool:
The coolest phrase I’ve learned this year is a Chinese one: 報復性熬夜 It translates to “revenge to stay up late,” and describes people who postpone their sleep because they’re so busy all day that they treasure their freedom before bed.
• If you are staying up late and want to read without waking anyone, check out this book light. It uses a warm bulb, so it won’t wake you up like a bright blue light. Can clip to a book or to a table.
Naps
• The US Military is increasingly using naps as performance enhancers. Even surgeons are doing it. The surgery article is not mind-blowing. Residents on night shift or 24 hr calls take more naps and are more tired. Feel like they could have done more with activity tracker data. But a decent read.
• You can get really fancy and try the coffee nap. Drink a cup of coffee right before you lay down. Just as the caffeine is taking effect (20-30 minutes), you wake up doubly refreshed. Mechanism: Adenosine is both cleared out and blocked from its receptors in your brain.
Allulose
• This sugar occurs in fruit (just in smaller quantities), thus is technically natural. We have eaten many products that contain the sugar. Peter Attia seems to be a big fan. He has disclosed that he invested in Magic Spoon, the low carb cereal company that uses allulose as a sweetener. Here is a link to a bag from Amazon ; we have not tried it out yet.
Healthy Deviant
• Recently finished a book called Healthy Deviant. The premise by author Pilar Gerasimo is that to be healthy one must deviate from the norm in our society. Sad but in most cases true. Gerasimo is also against fad dieting and obsession with being healthy. I cleaned up the notes I jotted down from the book, lots of great ideas here.
• In the US: 50% have chronic illness, 68% overweight or obese, 70% on at least one medication, 80% not flourishing, 97.3% not maintaining healthy habits (decent nutrition, adequate exercise, not smoking, healthy body composition).
• To be healthy is to be socially noncompliant with acts and attitudes. We misperceive the true nature of health problems, are involved in a giant experiment in “evolutionary mismatch” and no one is going to remind us of that experiment (See the Story of the Human Body by Lieberman). She calls it the UDR: unhealthy default reality. Multiple failures of remedies causes us to believe health issues are too difficult to be overcome.
• 45 million people go on diets each year, 5% success rate.
• How to use her book book: dive in, dabble, ramp up, use as Talisman (osmosis, let it speak to you from a distance, look at cover and spine…- I love that
• Mismatch modern people have: loss of meaning, community, vocation, awe, magic; issue is something more than diet and exercise.
• The UDR leads to ‘unhealthy default solutions.’ – tracking calories, steps, quantity obsession vs quality (food, movement, etc). We have trouble staying awake to the UDR, it is disorienting. This places the blame on us, rather than rigged system.
• Wendell Berry: “Whats wrong with us generates more GNP than whats right with us.”
• Ego depletion and learned helplessness – to recover, body-mind must be aggressively retrained. Don’t be a victim, see the UDR as a worthy foe, endless opportunity to become stronger, clearer, more creative.
• Buckminster Fuller: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
• Einstein: “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
• In Section 2 she shares her health journey as a Hero’s Journey, with phases beginning in childhood: natural state, compliance, descent, darkness, divergence, rebellion, … healthy deviance, return (back to natural state)
• Everyone should think about how much story matters, grappling with one’s past.
Her main pillars, possibly weakest part of her argument:
1) Amplified Awareness 2) Preemptive Repair 3) Continuous Growth and Learning and *Renegade Rituals
• Paradox: the less healthy and fit we are, the harder it is to do the things that would improve health and fitness
• Rest/break: the only thing standing between you and some life crisis with high price tag
• Renegade rituals: morning minutes (take back the morning, autonomy, theta waves), natural ultradian rhythm breaks (every 90 min, need rest, 90 min on, accumulate stress, 20 min off, oscillation. If you skip these breaks, very unhealthy by the end of the day.
• Joseph Campbell: ‘A ritual is enactment of a myth. And, by participating in the ritual, you are participating in the myth…your consciousness being reminded of the wisdom of your own life.’
• Zen: how you do anything is how you do everything. Also includes how you go about not doing all the things you want to do.
• Avoid calorie centric thinking. Nutrition facts, calories and macros, they hide ingredients, whole foods have 1 ingredient
• 3 different walks each day – warm up, regular, wild/fast
• Strategy: Announce plans to self, others. Expect ridicule, resistance, sabotage. Subvert the UDR, call out the crazy, make it a party (involve others).
• How to change: Nonviolence, civil disobedience. Creative maladjustment…Martin Luther King, Jr. – “There are some things in our society, world, to which we should never be adjusted.”
Quotes
The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most.
– Thomas Merton
As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
– John A Wheeler
