Do you like business success? Then read “Going the Distance,” in Columbia Business School’s alumni magazine, on how sports contribute to business success in an interview of me. Here is part of the interview, to whet your appetite: Skills mastered through endurance sports fuel success in business, says marathoner and serial entrepreneur Joshua Spodek ’06. […] First things first: why run?  One of the attractions of running is that there’s[…] Keep reading →

Leading others begins with leading yourself. Part of my daily workouts is to stretch my hamstrings by sitting with my legs straight in front of me, like this: How do you feel about your abdomen when you crunch forward like this? Does it show fat that you prefer people not see? Do you look flabby? Do you avoid such positions for that reason? I noticed that my entire life I’ve[…] Keep reading →

The reader I responded to Saturday also wrote the following: in the meanwhile i am writing to a medical doctor who is also a fitness expert so that i can meet her and set up a program that looks at both nutrition and exercise She’s doing what a lot of people do, especially well-educated businesspeople who have developed habits to analyze things before acting. I do so too on many[…] Keep reading →

The more I cook from whole vegetables, fruits, legumes, nuts, and so on, the more skeptically I look at companies that prepare food. Restaurants and packaged foods are designed to entertain your mouth, not to sustain you. If the people behind them have to sacrifice your health for their profit, they’ll do it. Increasingly I see them as seeking profit at the expense of my health, since what makes the[…] Keep reading →

A reader asked the following: Regarding exercise, I have been able to start with my running and I still have some questions around managing what i eat when.. evening times seem a kind of “let it all go” time.. any suggestions you have towards that would be great. She suggested adding that she’s “of Asian origin.” I’ll share what worked for me. Since there are a million books on diet[…] Keep reading →

A reader wrote to ask about my August 2012 post, “Three things I learned from yoga” “With yoga you can use your body alone to create many emotions and learn how to handle them.” Have you written more about this? I can only see me creating fear, determination, calmness, anger and patience. These don’t count to many, so I wonder what other emotions could one create? I haven’t done yoga[…] Keep reading →

The more attention I put to what I eat, the more important I find it to living a healthy, fulfilling, satisfying life. I wrote before about my rice cooker / vegetable steamer / miracle appliance, the Hitachi Chime-o-matic. I normally don’t promote products, but it’s so useful, I do with it. An old college friend visited over the summer, saw it, and asked if it’s the same rice cooker I[…] Keep reading →

I used to think of pasta and rice as staples—that is, the basic food of a meal to put everything else around. Over the years I’ve decreased the pasta, rice, and other staples in favor of vegetables. Now that I see restaurants’ goals less to healthily nourish you and more to entertain your mouth and eyes, I see so-called staples as ways to increase their profit at the expense of[…] Keep reading →

I eat a lot of mixed nuts and peanut butter. As far as I know, they’re all healthy to someone without allergies. I eat a lot of them. I found a site that shows pictures of two hundred calories of various foods. I like and eat a lot of broccoli. Here’s two hundred calories of broccoli: Looks like an amount that would go a long way to filling me up.[…] Keep reading →