People dream that if they eat unhealthy things, they can eat something healthy to average it out, as if broccoli had negative unhealthiness that averaged with ice cream’s unhealthiness to zero unhealthiness. Broccoli isn’t negative unhealthy. It’s normal. There is no negative unhealthiness. You can’t undo eating something unhealthy. If you’re just worried about empty calories, you can exercise, but it won’t undo all the unhealthiness of the ice cream.[…] Keep reading →

Everyone who knows me knows every morning I make my bed, cross the room, and turn off the alarm before it turns off, meaning within sixty seconds. I have other sidchas, like picking up litter daily, which I’ve done without fail since 2017. People ask why, which seems obvious. Doing something with a measure of quality and a time limit gives a sense of purpose. For a cash cost of[…] Keep reading →

I exercise on a five-day rotation between lifting, resting, and cardio so months with 31 days give me an extra rest day to experiment. This time I decided to try to recapture my nearly five-year-old achievement of 5,000 meters in 20 minutes on the rowing machine, which means averaging 2:00/500m for 20 minutes. A well-trained man in his 20s or 30s could do it easily. A serious competitor might not[…] Keep reading →

Yesterday, walking south along the Hudson River, I saw a guy running sprints on a pier. The temperature hovered around 50F (10C). It had rained on and off all day and was raining then. He was alone, running sprints in the rain. I call that commitment where no one would know if you didn’t glorious. I was out on my daily walk to pick up litter. I was taking a[…] Keep reading →

Here’s an exercise, just to imagine something: Imagine 24 hours without ingesting any doof—that is, without putting anything in your mouth whose primary pleasure comes from added salt, added sugar, added fat, or convenience. Nothing packaged. You know you can do it. That is, you know you possess the ability to do it. You know humans lived that way for almost all of human history. I’m not saying doof is[…] Keep reading →

This headline, Goodwill Doesn’t Want Your Broken Toaster, reminding me of my recent post that lines to dump worthless junk on Goodwill are often longer than the lines to buy it prompted me to post an idea I’ve had for a long time but for some reason haven’t posted. Pollution on the Earth is obesity on our bodies, manifesting our values and behaviors in different places. This: is this: The[…] Keep reading →

Over the weekend I went to Washington Square Park to read, so I was there for a couple hours. It was a beautiful, sunny day. Bright and just hot enough that you’d want to avoid the sun but not so hot that you couldn’t stand it. A guy sat on a bench diagonally across from me with a cup of ice cream from a nearby store. Besides him, I would[…] Keep reading →