Years ago someone told me the first meal after a three-day water-only fast tastes life-changingly good. I’d heard of fasting then, but 1) didn’t think much of it and 2) thought humans would die after a couple days, even with water. But he didn’t seem like he was lying and I liked the idea of a life-changing experience that cost no time or money, rather would save them. In May[…] Keep reading →

Freedom exists in structure. It’s not chaos, randomness, or luck. When I find something works in my life, I make it automatic. For many people, diet and exercise seem horror shows, or mysteries, wondering what they should do, how often, how much, and so on. When the most important bases of my life are automatic, I don’t have to think about them. I can focus on everything else. People might[…] Keep reading →

I once read that most people think their diet is more varied than they think. We fall back on what we like more often than we think. As a corollary, we tend to see others’ diets as less varied. (I couldn’t find the research on diet variety, but Most people think their diet is healthier than it is: U.S. adults commonly overestimate the quality of their diet, study shows, which[…] Keep reading →

It’s easy to track how many burpees I do as part of my twice-daily burpee-based calisthenics. I know how many I do per day and I don’t miss days, so I just update the date in my spreadsheet and it tells me. More accurately, the spreadsheet tells me a minimum since now and then I do burpees for other reasons, but I haven’t missed and, so I’ve done more than[…] Keep reading →

For the first couple days, I was still getting used to it and wondering how things would go. Later, it became a ritual, like my morning and evening calisthenics, giving structure to my life. Also, have you noticed how when movies have monks, they often show a scene of them mopping the floor, or some repetitive task that for a monk becomes mindful? Like that. Lately I’ve been thinking, “Why[…] Keep reading →

A friend told me he thought of me and my sustainability leadership work with concern while reading the book The Mating Mind. He described it as describing the implications and effects of sexual selection in evolution. He started with the example of peacocks having elaborate tails. Sexual selection suggests that the tails that make them easy targets for predators indicate all its other genes are fit, so a potential mate[…] Keep reading →

In its August 22 issue, the New Yorker published a piece, Africa’s Cold Rush and the Promise of Refrigeration: For the developing world, refrigeration is growth. In Rwanda, it could spark an economic transformation. August 22 happened to start my fourth month of my experiment disconnecting my apartment from the electric grid, which is to say 3.93 months longer than I expected to make it. The article was about bringing[…] Keep reading →