The New Savagery

From Resolution to Reality: Part II

2021-01-16T08:45:00.001-05:00

Last week, I wrote about how "focus is the currency of resolve." Without focus, we cannot maintain resolve. In a sense, focus and resolve are similar.

When we resolve we "settle on a solution" or "decide firmly on a course of action."

Last week, I also wrote about notional boundaries, the beginnings of days, weeks, or months that often inspire so much enthusiasm. The new year is, perhaps, the ultimate notional boundary, the moment when so many of us, inspired by the very idea of beginning, resolve to change.

I am reminded of the famous quote, often misattributed to Goethe:

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.

Beyond the misattribution, the problem with this quote, however inspiring it may be, is its utter lack of specificity and practicality.

A resolve to change, then, must be accompanied by a focus, "the center of interest or activity" or a "clear visual definition." It is no coincidence that visualization is associated with a host of benefits, including "confidence, courage, focus, concentration, and...resilience."

In other words, you start with solution and you maintain your resolve with a clean vision of what you need to do, each and every day. Of course, I am using these words for my own purposes here. One could define the calculus of change in many ways.

I like both words, resolve and focus, because they imply centeredness: a solution, a center of activity.

However, in my experience, resolve and focus are also helpful because they speak to another key element of change.

To make a change, you must begin it now, yes, but you must also begin it the next hour, and the next hour, and the next day, forever focused on your goals. Even as you remain rooted with your "robust soul" you must venture out, and "level that life, to pass and continue beyond."

Momentum: The Key to Change

Momentum is "the quantity of motion of a moving body, measured as a product of its mass and velocity." This popular definition from physics is helpful because it speaks to the basic element of movement.

For our purposes, we can simplify momentum into two parts: positive momentum and negative momentum.

Positive momentum: Good choices lead to more good choices.

Negative momentum: Bad choices lead to more bad choices.

We all cycle through both types of momentum, each and every day. This is life. On one day, you exercise, feel inspired to eat a healthy dinner, and then enjoy a beautiful night's sleep, which leads to a new day of good choices--at least the start of a new good day.

On another day, you drink too much wine, sleep poorly, and wake up yearning for a donut. Incidentally, science tells us why we have this sort of craving. And we know, as Matthew Walker writes in Why We Sleep, that "too little sleep swells concentrations of a hormone that makes you hungry while suppressing a companion hormone that otherwise signals food satisfaction."

Most of us understand, intuitively, how our habits, good or bad, create their own sort of momentum.

Despite this knowledge, many of us feel helpless to escape our cycles or good and bad; many of us feel stuck in our "rat race." As Bob Marley sings: "Don't forget your history/ Know your destiny/ In the abundance of water/ The fool is thirsty."

Happily, you don't need to be thirsty. You can escape the rat race quickly and easily, and once you've learned how to escape, you don't have to look back.

The Autonomic Nervous System: The Root of Momentum

How do you feel right now? To a large degree, your physical and emotional state at any given moment is defined by the relative balance of your autonomic nervous system.

The nervous system, which is comprised of the brain and spinal cord, is the body's communication network. When we receive sensory input, our brain sends messages to the rest of the body through nerves that branch off from the spine. Many these impulses govern our conscious actions, like getting out of bed, picking up the phone, and checking social media.

The nervous system also communicates impulses with the autonomic nervous system (ANS), which governs unconscious actions. The ANS includes the enteric nervous system (responsible for digestion), and the sympathetic and the parasympathetic devious.

These two divisions are often defined as antagonistic in nature because they often perform opposing actions in the body.

The sympathetic nervous system is our "flight or fight" response, which "directs the body's rapid involuntary response to dangerous or stressful situations" (source). As Live Science notes:

A flash flood of hormones boosts the body's alertness and heart rate, sending extra blood to the muscles. Breathing quickens, delivering fresh oxygen to the brain, and an infusion of glucose is shot into the bloodstream for a quick energy boost.

The parasympathetic nervous system is our "rest and relax" response. As Science Daily notes: "the parasympathetic system conserves energy as it slows the heart rate, increases intestinal and gland activity, and relaxes sphincter muscles in the gastrointestinal tract."

Ideally, these two systems perform in concert, creating a harmonious balance, a condition few moderns humans enjoy. This fact that should be obvious to anyone who wakes up, picks up the phone, and checks social media, instigating an immediate sympathetic response.

We may not have to fend for our lives like an ancient ancestors, in whom the fight or flight response developed as a response to threats. But our modern body cannot differentiate between a ferocious lion and a triggering social media post--and so, too often, we are thrown into a sympathetic mode in our day-to-day lives.

Recently, Marcelo Campos noted on the Harvard Health Blog:

If we have persistent instigators such as stress, poor sleep, unhealthy diet, dysfunctional relationships, isolation or solitude, and lack of exercise, this balance may be disrupted, and your fight-or-flight response can shift into overdrive.

Essentially, this is the rat race, and this is the momentum of our stressful lives, which creates anxiety and depression, and ultimately distracts us from our resolves.

Heart Rate Variability: A Key Metric

To recover, we must shift our momentum. We must find balance. Balance can be quantified in a precise way. One recent determinant is heart rate variability (HRV), a measure of the variation between two heartbeats.

As Jay T. Wiles recently noted on the Wild Health Podcast: "The heart does not operate like a metronome...There should be variability. More variability of the heart demonstrates more psychological and physiological resilience to outside and internal stressors."

As noted above, of course, most of us do not enjoy this resilience. As the data analytics company Firstbeat notes:

HRV level changes naturally from day to day, based on the level of activity and amount of, for example, work-related stress, but if a person is chronically stressed or overloaded – physically or mentally – the natural interplay between the two systems can be disrupted, and the body can get stuck in a sympathetically dominant fight state, with low HRV and high stress hormone levels, even when the person is resting. This is very consuming on the body and can result in various mental and physical health problems.

Sound familiar?

Find Your Center: Breath

We have many, many options for halting the momentum of the sympathetic state and downshifting into the parasympathetic state.

All of us have within us the power to try perhaps the easiest, most effective, and most time-honored of all healing techniques: breathing.

In his recent book Breath, James Nestor argues that breathing exercises can change your life. As Nestor notes, up to 80% of us are breathing inadequately and 25% suffer from chronic over-breathing. We are meant to breath primarily through our noses, yet "up to a half of us habitually take in breath from our mouths" (source).

Mouth breathing is terrible for our health. Thankfully, for those who wish to make a change, the wellness world is ready with legions of videos and apps. Nestor himself has a wonderful resource page on his blog.

Some of my favorite breathing exercises include the 4,7,8 method (which influences the autonomic nervous system) and the Wim Hof Method.

Be Uncomfortable (For a Bit): Hormetic Stressors

Wim Hof is also famous for cold exposure, a form of hormesis: a moderate (and usually intermittent) stress that produces an adaptive, beneficial response in the cells.

Hormesis is the very essence of resilience--by exposing ourselves to small stressors, we condition the body and mind to better handle the all-embracing stress of modern life.

Beyond cold exposure, which can change your life too, common examples of hormetic stress include heat exposure, certain plant compounds (like sulforaphane), and exercise and fasting.

Hormesis may have a significant influence on aging. As the popular aging researcher David Sinclair says, each day be a little bit out of breath and a little bit hungry.

Of all the hormetic stressors, fasting may be the simplest and most straightforward way to develop emotional and physical resilience (or "metabolic flexibility").

I’ve followed a routine of "time-restricted eating" for a decade or more. Most people might do this inadvertently, but most of us also snack and nibble throughout the day between meals. My practice is quite simple: I skip breakfast. By skipping breakfast, I usually create about 16 hours (from about 8:30 PM the previous night to 12:30 PM that day) when I do not consume food.

More on Time-Restricted Eating Improving Healthspan

I also often stack my stressors, which may enhance benefits. Exercising on an empty stomach may increase fat oxidation.

Recover: Sleep

Sleep is undoubtedly the single best tool for optimizing mental, emotional, and physical resilience. As the sleep researcher, Matthew Walker writes, "sleep is the single most effective thing we can do to reset our brain and body health each day."

Learning about the dynamics of sleep, including the various sleep stages, and the importance of different types of sleep, including REM sleep and "deep" slow wave sleep, has profoundly changed my life.

Matthew Walker is a wonderful resource. I recommend his three-part podcast with Peter Attia: start here. I also recommend his book, Why We Sleep.

In concert with learning, by tracking my sleep on my Whoop strap, I have learned to associate certain behaviors with better sleep.

I now pay attention to the deeply biological wisdom of my circadian rhythm, and I try to support my own rhythmicity with daily habits like morning sun exposure, avoiding blue light at night, and sleeping in total darkness. For several years now, our house has not had one single blue-light lightbulb. (We use amber bulbs instead).

My nighttime ritual, which includes a magnesium tonic and CBD, is non-negotiable in much the same way Walker says that, for him, eight hours of sleep is non-negotiable.

Learning about sleep and developing your own sleep-supportive ritual is, in my opinion, the best way to set yourself up to meet the challenge of your resolves on any single day, week, month, or season.

From Resolution to Reality: Part 1

2021-01-09T08:58:00.004-05:00

A few months ago, I watched a video from my children's elementary school: The kid's principal, Mr. Mac, was announcing the week's "blue ticket" winners. A student earns a blue ticket for embodying the school pledge:

I am a positive, proud, productive, and patriotic member of the Fort Washington community. I will try my hardest. I will never give up. My heart believes it, and my actions show it!

When Mr. Mac announced the Kindergarten winners, I wasn't exactly holding my breath. So when he said, "Owen Pollins," my reaction was genuine. I shouted, "Yes," pumping my fist.

When Mr. Mac announced the third-grade winners, I couldn't help but feel expectant. Still, when he said, "Ella Pollins," I was startled.

Two winners? "Yes," I said. Then I began to cry.

I never know when I'll cry, though some moments are easy to predict: watching "Golden Buzzer" clips, listening to "Blackbird," or reading a poem like "The Bench."

This moment was unexpected, in part, because it inspired a simple realization: Damn, this is hard. All of it. The quarantine. The isolation. The election. The twenty-four-seven life with the family. And the children have endured countless trials, from virtual learning to Camp Overlord, and day after day of loneliness and boredom. Owen's had four teachers this year! And Ella wrote a book called SADNESS.

And yet, here they were, winning blue tickets.

Since last March, I've attempted to defy everything with relentless self-improvement projects, forever selfish in my pursuit to emerge from this shitshow stronger and healthier, with stupendous hair. If I'd stopped to look, though, I would've seen a true portrait of strength right in front of me.

For Owen and Ella, this time has never been about the end. "When will this be over?" Ella often asks, but both Ella and Owen's concern are immediate: "Can we play now?"

It was clear why my children had won the blue tickets: They had tried their hardest. They hadn't given up. Their hearts had believed it. And their actions had showed it.

To me, this pledge suddenly seemed instructive. And I believe it can be instructive for anyone who resolves to thrive in 2021.

Notional Boundaries: The Power (and Problems) of Beginnings

Why do we feel so compelled to make resolutions?

In a classic piece for the New Yorker, "Why We Make Resolutions (and Why They Fail)", Maria Konnikova writes about timing and optimism:

"The beginning of a week, a month, or a year forms...a notational boundary."

These "notional boundaries" inspire optimism, and the beginning of a new year inspires extreme optimism. Just witness the "resolutionists" at the local gym courageously weightlifting, cycling, and running their way to the new, healthy person they hope to be.

Unfortunately, the optimism of a notional boundary is hard to sustain throughout the week, month, and year. Buoyed by our optimism, we set unreachable expectations and condemn ourselves to failure.

In 2008, the time management firm, Franklin Covey, surveyed over 15,000 customers about their New Year's resolutions. One-third of the survey participants broke their resolutions before February and only 20% stuck with their resolutions (source).

Why We Fail: Specificity and Practicality

So why do we fail?

As Tara Parker Pope writes for The New York Times: "Resolutions tend to be too big without any thought about whether they are practical or even possible."

Specificity is key. Instead of resolving to "eat more healthy," you might resolve to limit your dinnertime portions (to one plate), or skip breakfast. I often tell wellness clients to start at the beginning of the day with a "morning elixir" (details here).

The practicalities matter, too. If you fool yourself into believing making a change is merely a matter of will, you will likely fail. Change is hard.

As Jerome Groopman notes in a New Yorker article, "Can Brain Science Help us Break Bad Habits": "A large majority of us lack the self-control required to succeed in life."

The Importance of Habits

However, as Groopman notes, we can "hack" our habits by "finding ways to take will-power out of the equation." As far back as the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle cited habit as the as the root of virtue.

Summarizing Aristotle's virtue ethics in his famous book, The Story of Philosophy, Will Durant offered a succinct quote often misattributed to Aristotle: "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then is not an act but a habit."

You know that famous marshmallow experiment--the one frequently cited to prove the power of delayed gratification, which leads to greater success later in life? Only a quarter of the participants--kids aged 4 to 6--succeeded in resisting the treat for a full 15 minutes.

Groopman notes a nuance of the experiment:

The researchers compared the results of two situations: in one, children could see the marshmallow in front of them; in the other, they knew that it was there but couldn’t see it. On average, the children lasted only six minutes when presented with visible temptation but could manage ten minutes if the treat was hidden.

Perhaps the key is eliminating temptation. Groopman quotes a researcher who suggests creating friction--making our bad habits more inconvenient.

A few years ago, I resolved to reduce my screen time, and I tried to support this resolution by deleting all social media apps.

However, Groopman's article also describes another practical approach to changing habits: replace one habit with another and include rewards for the change. Instead of scrolling my social media feeds, I tried to read articles or books, or watch movies (in the evening).

In the end, I failed. Lately, especially since the election, I've fallen head over heels back into my scrolling addiction.

The Currency of Resolve: Focus

Beyond specificity and practicality, Tara Parker Pope's advice speaks subtly to a more fundamental element of making a change.

In my experience, the phrase, "without any thought," strikes much closer to the core problem. If you're like me, your attempts to change fail because you have not set your focus--your attention (and intention)--to being the change you want to see.

As Pedram Shojai recently said on the Bulletproof podcast:

If you can't focus on what you say you want, and your focus gets pulled out into Instagram and into the Internet, and it gets pulled out into...the next crisis, you're never going to map out your life in a way that is going to be meaningful and going to nourish you because your priorities are being supplanted by the priorities put in front of you by social media or the news.

Obviously, this quote is specific to my failure, but it speaks to the essential nature of any failure. What Shojai is talking about here is integrity: Being your word. Focusing on what you say you want so you can be who you say you want to be.

As Shojai notes: "We say we want something but our actions say otherwise."

In other words, to succeed, my heart must believe it, and my actions must show it.

In this sense, a true change requires an honest and clear assessment of how and where we spend our focus, and a corresponding resolve to shift that focus--and our actions--to what we want. This is not a nebulous concept. It is simple and straightforward: To change ask yourself, "How I am spending my time?"

The allure of social media and the "screen" is instructive, in this sense, because it is a distraction must people share. The famed researcher Adam Alter offers a bleak assessment of our screen time:

Before the introduction of the iPhone, it was a couple of hours, and that was usually just in front of a TV. We only spent about 18 minutes looking at our phones. Once that device was...10 years later actually in 2017, we were spending about three or four hours a day looking at those screens; sometimes for kids, five or six hours a day. Personal time, exercising, hobbies, conversations with friends and loved ones used to be a couple of hours a day. It was now about half an hour or even slightly less than half an hour a day (source).

The math here adds up to an unsettling conclusion: At our current rates, we are likely to spend 10-20 years of our lives (or more) on our phones.

My Heart Believes It, And My Actions Show It!

To change, we must shift our focus. If you believe you want to change, your actions must reflect that change. Shojai looks at focus as a sort of capital. You reveal your priorities in your decisions to do one thing over another.

One way to look a this is to honestly assess everything you believe you want to say "yes" to--your resolutions, so to speak. Your family and friends? Your projects? Cooking? Exercise? Mindfulness?

Once you've added all of these together, ask yourself, as Shojai suggests, "How many hours of the day are left after all of those yeses." Inevitably, you will have to say "no" to other things. You will have to reconcile what you want with what you do.

This year, I resolved to spend less time on the phone. So far, I have failed miserably. I was drawn into the news, to the insistent beat of the chaos, which has guided and directed so much of our recent attention. And as I have let my attention stray, I have let me emotions stray, from optimism to anger.

This is unfortunate. The Buddhist quote says, "You are the first victim of your anger." And by saying, "Yes," to the phone, and the never ending chaos, I cringe to think of all that I have said, "No," to. My family and friends? My projects? Cooking? Exercise? Mindfulness?

Happily, today is a new day. And on any given day, I can resolve to change.

James Baldwin: "Rejoice in the fact of death"

2020-06-13T09:14:00.000-04:00

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.

~James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

Food: Pleasure and Beauty

2020-05-09T09:10:00.000-04:00

"Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are," Brillat-Savarin wrote in his masterwork, The Physiology of Taste, a collection of recipes and parables with topics ranging from "the inconvenience of obesity," to digestion, to food's effect on dreams, and so much more.

In investigating food's relationship to the body, however, Brillat Savarin probed deeply into the nature of food as a tonic for the soul:

"Those who have been too long at their labor, who have drunk too long at the cup of voluptuousness, who feel they have become temporarily inhumane, who are tormented by their families, who find life sad and love ephemeral...they should all eat chocolate and they will be comforted."

Elsewhere he asks of Adam and Eve, "You first parents of the human race … who ruined yourselves for an apple, what might you not have done for a truffled turkey?"

When thinking about diet, or sitting down to dinner, it often strikes me that comfort, and for that matter, pleasure, beauty, and happiness, is at least as important as nutrition.

After all, how you eat is an essential expression of who you are. And often, this expression has little to do with what you eat. A cupcake eaten with joy is superior to a bowl of brown rice eaten with penance. Good food, eaten with good company, inspires an inner joy so simple and sustaining that even a tiny olive fulfills. Without this joy, the most wholesome food can seem tasteless and unsatisfying.

In this spirit, I hope to offer a smattering of "lockdown recipes," each developed with wholesomeness and pleasure in mind.

Waking Up: The Morning Elixir

The “morning elixir”--the term was coined, to the best of my knowledge, by Paul Pritchford--refers to a morning cleansing drink. Often, upon awakening, we are thirsty but not hungry; often, too, our stomachs are empty, and we might benefit from a cleansing elixir.

Depending upon your constitution, typical elixirs might include purified water, herbal tea, warm broth, vegetable juices, greens drinks, or fresh lemon juice in purified water.

For years, my preferred morning elixir was inner-ēco™ Coconut Water Probiotic Kefir, a probiotic drink. Lately, I've also enjoyed Four Sigmatic Chaga Mushrooms.

After my morning tonic, I fast (see below) until lunch or sometimes until dinner, drinking only one cup of organic coffee with theanine in the morning and organic green tea or organic turmeric tea in the afternoon.

Bulk Supplements L-Theanine Powder

Ocha and Company Organic Sencha Tea

Rishi Turmeric-Ginger Tea

Time-Restricted Eating

I’ve followed a routine of time-restricted eating for a decade or more. Most people might do this inadvertently, but most of us also snack and nibble throughout the day between meals. For me, the key is to not eat anything between meals, for a period of 12-22 hours or more.

My personal practice is quite simple: I skip breakfast. By skipping breakfast, I usually create about 16 hours (from about 8:30 PM the previous night to 12:30 PM that day) when I do not consume food.

The emerging science behind intermittent fasting has discovered that when fasting our bodies may switch from growth to repair mode--a process known as "autophagy."

A Japanese scientist, Yoshinori Ohsumi, won the 2016 Novel Prize for "his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy." As the prize committee states: autophagy is "a fundamental process for degrading and recycling cellular components."

Rhonda Patrick on Autophagy

More on Time-Restricted Eating Improving Healthspan

More importantly, however, time-restricted eating has helped me discover a greater joy in my diet. I am more conscientious about how, why, and when I do eat I am truly hungry.

Morning Recipes

A Perfect Pot of Oatmeal

This recipe, which I originally developed for Whole Foods, takes cues from both Cook's Illustrated, who suggest using longer-cooking steel-cut oats and Peter Berley, who suggests soaking the oats overnight in a souring agent, such as yogurt, to promote lactic-acid formation. The final dish is delicious and creamy with a slight tang. Steel-cut oats take longer to cook than rolled oats, but much of the cooking time requires minimal attention.

1 cup steel-cut oats
3 1/2 cups spring water
1/4 cup plain full-fat yogurt
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
Fresh sliced apples, yogurt, or nuts for topping

In a heavy saucepan, combine the oats, water, and yogurt. Cover the pan and soak overnight, 8 to 10 hours.

In the morning, put the saucepan over medium-high heat and bring to a lively simmer. Simmer gently for 20 minutes. Add the salt and stir lightly with a wooden spoon. Continue simmering, stirring occasionally with a wooden spoon, until oats have absorbed most of the water and the oatmeal is thick and creamy, 5-7 minutes.

Let the oatmeal stand off the heat for 5 minutes. Serve topped with fresh apple slices, yogurt, or crushed nuts.

Other Good Morning Options:

Berlin Bakery Spelt Bread

Magic Spoon Cereal

How to Poach a Perfect Egg

Lunchtime

During "normal" life, many of us eat hurried lunches in harried environments. If anything, the quarantine offers an opportunity to recalibrate our relationship with lunch.

My own relationship with lunch is informed by the time I spent in Italy and Spain during my early twenties. Both cultures view lunch as the main meal, a time to rest and relax with family and friends.

When I do not have time for a proper lunch, I often fast or eat simply: a few poached eggs or sardines and salad. When I do have time for a proper lunch, I inevitably start with soup, the true centerpiece of my diet, perhaps my life. I also usually eat tempeh and salad.

Carrot Ginger Soup

3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil or grassfed butter
2 medium onions (preferably sweet onions), diced
1/2 cup crystallized ginger, chopped
1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger
1 tablespoon minced fresh turmeric
1 teaspoon dried turmeric powder
Sea salt
5 pounds carrots, peeled and sliced into 1/4" slices
5 cups vegetable stock or bone broth
1 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup full fat coconut milk
1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar

In a soup pot, heat the oil over medium heat. Add the onion and a pinch of salt, cover, turn heat to low, and sauté until translucent, 10-12 minutes. Add the crystallized ginger, fresh ginger, fresh turmeric, turmeric powder, and1 teaspoon sea salt. Cook over medium heat, stirring, for two minutes.

Add broth, carrots, and baking soda. Increase heat to high and bring soup to a simmer. Cover and reduce heat. Cook until carrots are tender (20-25 minutes).

When cooled, working in small batches, puree soup with coconut milk in blender until very smooth. Return pureed soup to pot and add carrot juice and vinegar. Bring to a simmer. Add salt to taste.

Pan-Seared Zucchini

In this recipe, thick rounds of zucchini are seared in a piping hot pan — cast iron is best — until just blackened, then tossed with olive oil. This is a summer recipe that adapts easily to most seasons. In Philly, we get local zukes (hothouse) throughout the fall, even into the winter, but summer zukes are undoubtedly the best.

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1/4 teaspoon sea salt
2 large green zucchini

Slice zucchini into large rounds. Warm a 10-inch skillet (cast iron is best) until very hot. Place zucchini in pan and sear over high heat, until blackened, 2 to 3 minutes. Flip onto other side and sear additional 2 to 3 minutes, until both sides are blackened. Toss with olive oil and sea salt. Serve as is or with mashed avocado.

Good Lunchtime Recipes:

Moroccan Chermoula Tempeh

A Perfect Pot of Rice

Blackened Jalapeño and Avocado Dipping Sauce

Dinnertime

I look forward to dinner all day. To me, dinner is the point. Dinner absolves the day's hassles. Dinner redeems the day's failures. Without dinner, the day has no structure, no purpose. Dinner is not only food--it is communion, with others, with ourselves. Immersed in our daytime ambitions and jobs and twitter accounts, we might lose sight of those we love; we might lose sight of ourselves. Dinner saves us. When we sit down to dinner, we settle back into ourselves; we become human again.

Perfect Grilled Chicken

One small chicken - 3 1/2 pounds
Sea salt
To stuff: 1 chopped onion, lemon, or apple

Pat the chicken very dry and season on all sides with sea salt, sugar, and brown sugar. Air dry on a rack in the refrigerator for 1 to 3 days before cooking. Before cooking, stuff the bird with any of following: chopped onion, lemon, or apple.

When you're ready to grill the chicken, cook breast-side down over indirect heat on medium-high (400-425 degrees) for 25 minutes. With a pair of tongs, flip the bird breast-side up for another 25 minutes.

Remove the chicken from the grill and set on a cutting board. Cut the chicken into pieces and serve.

Perfect Mashed Potatoes

5 pounds Russet potatoes, peeled and left whole

4-6 tablespoons grassfed butter
1/2 cup coconut milk (full-fat is best)
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
Fresh ground black pepper

Place the potatoes in a large saucepan with water to cover. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to medium and simmer until the potatoes are tender, 25-35 minutes. Drain. Reserve pot for mashing.

Meanwhile, warm the coconut milk in a medium saucepan over low heat. Season the coconut milk with sea salt, and black pepper to taste.

While still warm, cut each potato and place the potatoes, skin-on, into a food ricer or food mill. Extrude into empty pot.

Alternately, gently mash the potatoes with a potato masher.

Add grassfed butter. Add the warmed coconut milk, and gently season with additional salt and pepper, adjusting seasonings to taste.

Boiled Potatoes with Grassfed Butter and Herbs

1 1/2 pounds petite red or fingerling potatoes
1 1/2 tablespoons grassfed salted butter
1/2 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
Sea salt
freshly ground black pepper

Place potatoes in a medium saucepan. Cover with cold water. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer gently until potatoes are just tender when pierced with a knife, 18 to 20 minutes. Drain well.

In a small mixing bowl, add butter, olive oil, and sea salt to taste to drained potatoes and toss well. Taste and adjust seasoning, adding additional salt and pepper if needed.

Good Dinnertime Recipes:

Three Kickass Chickpea Recipes

Greatest Roast Potatoes Ever

Serious Eats Sweet Mashed Potatoes

Coconut Milk Braised Greens

Immunity: Diversity and Unity

2020-05-02T09:01:00.000-04:00

Medical literature often describes the immune system as a wartime defense strategy against invaders.

"Without an immune system," Medical News Today writes, "our bodies would be open to attack...It is our immune system that keeps us healthy as we drift through a sea of pathogens."

"When functioning properly," LiveScience writes, "the immune system identifies and attacks a variety of threats...while distinguishing them from the body’s own healthy tissue."

While true, these definitions tend to downplay the adaptive function of the immune system--in attacking invaders, immune cells also produce antibodies, which assimilate or harmonize the invader, rendering it less harmful. This is also the function of a vaccine. This is also why many of us may have cross-reactive antibodies (from suffering other forms of coronavirus), which may help if we get infected with this new coronavirus.

As my friend and teacher, the doctor and poet C. Dale Young writes on Facebook:

"We all have been infected by a coronavirus at one time or another. Therefore, even though this is a new virus, many of its proteins have been seen by your immune system before. Even if infected, your immune system can fight it off."

Read: "How the Immune System Works"

A Metaphorical View of Immunity

Viewed metaphorically, I think, these two functions of the immune system, attack and adapt, speak to any number of current ways of thinking about our world.

In recent years, for example, even as the fear of invaders has seemingly spread across the world--in calls for border walls and Brexit-style isolationism--more and more people are beginning to see the vital importance of living in harmony not only with each other but with nature.

In his famous encyclical, Laudato si', Pope Francis writes movingly of humans living in harmony with nature:

"There is a growing sensitivity to the environment and the need to protect nature, along with a growing concern, both genuine and distressing, for what is happening to our planet… Our goal is not to amass information or to satisfy curiosity, but rather to become painfully aware, to dare to turn what is happening to the world into our own personal suffering and thus to discover what each of us can do about it."

When thinking about immunity, I urge you to be wary of unwanted invaders--to stay at home, wash your hands, and practice distancing, when possible.

But I also urge you to think holistically about immunity as an adaptive process What's so empowering about this view, I believe, is that by working on your own immunity you cultivate a harmonizing power that can transform yourself and the world around you.

Whenever I think about my own connection to the environment, I remember the happiness of my early-eighties childhood, when the grass was nothing less than "the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven."

What Can We Do?

I cannot read these lines from Pope Francis without thinking about our current crisis, which in so many ways feels like a call to "discover what each of us can do."

For those of us sheltering in place, this call is partly spiritual and partly practical: How can we live right now to help ourselves and each other emerge from this crisis stronger and more unified, equipped to battle the next crisis with equanimity and resolve?

Humanity has shown, again and again, that we can emerge from a crisis stronger and more unified--after any number of assaults, we have adapted and evolved as a people.

One of my favorite examples is the Victory Gardens of World War I and II, when the National War Garden Commission encouraged Americans to grow gardens so more food could be exported to our European allies. After the second war, especially, the Victory Gardens proved tremendously successful:

"In 1942, roughly 15 million families planted victory gardens; by 1944, an estimated 20 million victory gardens produced roughly 8 million tons of food—which was the equivalent of more than 40 percent of all the fresh fruits and vegetables consumed in the United States" (source).

Gardens feel relevant to our current crisis, too, even beyond the fear of shortages that have prompted more people to plant gardens. A garden is one way for a human to connect with the earth in a way that enhances the health of both. The key, in both cases, is the land itself--the dirt.

Immunity and the Hygiene Hypothesis

An increasing body of scientific evidence supports the "hygiene hypothesis," the notion that our modern sterile environments, in our living and working environments as well as our bodies, weakens our immune response.

As Kathleen Barnes, a Johns Hopkins Medical School researcher, said in a Science Talk podcast on the hygiene hypotheses:

"As we make the shift from dirt to sterile...you...chang[e] the direction of your immune response. And so in the context of asthma, and...other autoimmune diseases and diseases of inflammation, it's this imbalance from that side of our immune response that we believe evolved to protect us against things like bacteria and viruses...to the other side of our immune system that, frankly, when it's revved up causes diseases like allergies and...other diseases of inflammation."

The sterile environment engendered by antibiotics and antibacterial soaps, detergents, and household cleaning products, not to mention the chemicals in our food and water systems, decrease the biodiversity of our microbiomes and increase our resistance to life-saving antibiotics.

These same chemicals are a scourge to our natural systems, creating polluted waterways, which run into the ocean and exacerbating the problem of fallow farmlands in America, far worse than the original Dust Bowl.

Zach Bush, the triple board-certified doctor, speaks eloquently of these issues, specifically on several life-changing episodes of The Rich Roll Podcast. I recommend Zach's recent appearance, in which hie discussed a "Pandemic of Possibility," but I implore you to listen to his first two appearances on Rich Roll, in which Zach explores the GMOs, gut health, and the science of human and planetary transformation. I can truly say that these podcasts changed my life.

Listen: "Zach Bush, MD On GMO’s, Glyphosate, and Healing The Gut"

Listen: "Zach Bush, MD on the Science and Spirituality of Human and Planetary Transformation"

Elsewhere, Zach states "the problem" of our current relationship with the environment quite bluntly:

"A century of mono-crop farming and reliance on pesticides has damaged our nation’s once-fertile soils and the health of every American. The rapid increase in pesticide use over the past few decades has coincided with this explosion of chronic disease."

The solution to this problem, as Zach and others have noted, is a return to "regenerative agriculture." Zach has even created an organization to help farmers: Farmer's Footprint

The scope of this problem, like the current pandemic, feels overwhelming, especially when viewed on the micro-level, from your own perspective. Yet you can make changes now to help yourself and the planet, supporting the immunity of both.

The key is engendering bacterial diversity and unity within and without. Practically speaking, this means supporting brands that offer safe alternatives to household products as well as supporting agriculture that promotes ecological diversity in the environment and your own body.

To do so, eat an abundance of fresh fruits and vegetables from local farms. Tend to your inner garden with fermented foods or, if necessary, gut-supporting supplements, like Just Thrive or Zach's mineral supplement to "support the integrity of tight junctions in the gut lining": ION* Gut Health. Or try quality "probiotic" foods, like inner-ēco Coconut Kefir.

And FYI: You do not need to wash your hands with anti-bacterial soap right now. Source: FDA.

Supporting Immunity Strategically

Changing your lifestyle by synching with nature (emotionally, spiritually, and biologically) is the best way to support immunity. Beyond engendering a diverse ecosystem within and without, pay attention to both defense against attack as well as the adaptive side of immunity.

Even at home, we have at our disposal any number of adaptive strategies to improve immune function, including cold therapy, mindfulness, exercise, and sleep, which plays a crucial role in regulating the activity of our Natural Killer T-Cells.

However, of course, in the time of COVID 19, you may feel a need to support immunity with supplementation.

First, try to ignore the apparent hype surrounding a variety of "immune-boosting" formulas, which seem to miss the concept of immunity entirely:

"The immune system is not designed to be 'boosted', and if it were able to work in overdrive it could actually result in us becoming more unwell by damaging our healthy cells and tissue as well, which is what can happen in 'autoimmune' conditions."

Second, focus on the supplements that arrive with sound scientific evidence, including Vitamin D (1), Zinc (1), Vitamin C, Sulphorphane, and possibly others, like selenium.

Resources

Dr. Bronner's Soap

Our Favorite Laundry Detergent: Molly's Suds

Our Favorite Dishwasher Tabs: Ecover Automatic Dishwasher Tabs

Our Favorite Toothpaste: Weleda Natural Salt Toothpaste

Zinc

Life Extension Zinc Lozenges

Vitamin C

There is evidence that Vitamin C can fight the common cold, reduce respiratory symptoms, boost immunity, and alleviate the body's response to stress.

The best form of Vitamin C (especially if you intend to take larger doses if you get sick) may be liposomal. But remember, since Vitamin C is water-soluble, you'll likely want to take it throughout the day to maintain your levels.

NutriFlair Liposomal Vitamin C

Dacha Liposomal Vitamin C

Rhonda Patrick on Vitamin C

Vitamin D3 with K2

Reasonable sun exposure (without burning) is the best way to get Vitamin D, but supplementation is likely necessary right now for most of us on the East Coast. Even then, I'm guessing all of us, if tested, would have low vitamin-D levels.

As noted in a major global study, optimized Vitamin D levels protect against "acute respiratory infections including colds and flu."

Most experts feel that taking Vitamin D3 with K2 increases absorption.

If you're not currently taking vitamin D3 supplement with K2, you might consider the following:

Thorne Research Vitamin D3 and K2 Liquid Drops

Micro Ingredients Vitamin D3 and K2 Softgels

Mood: How to Optimize Your Emotional Resilience

2020-04-25T09:02:00.000-04:00

How do you feel? We hear this question so often, in so many different contexts, and our answer is invariably the same: "Good." Or perhaps, "Fine."

Yet, during any given day, how often do we stop to sincerely consider this question.

How do I feel? How do I feel right now?

Learning to improve your health is often about learning to answer this question with pinpoint accuracy. Is this possible? I believe so. Over the coming days and weeks, I urge you to ask yourself this question and to answer honestly with self-compassion.

Today, I will discuss how to answer this question. I will also offer specific tools for optimizing the answer, whatever it may be.

Handsome Sad Clown

The Gut-Brain Axis

When asking yourself this question in the context of mood, specifically, the first thing you'll likely note is that your mood is never merely about your feelings (your emotions). The answer is usually equal parts body and mind.

The condition of your gut, for example, inevitably informs the condition of your mind. For many years, in fact, I have focused on this connection as a simple yet powerful guide to improving my own mood.

In a well-referenced article from Psychology Today, Marwa Azab Ph.D., writes: "There is bidirectional communication between the gut and the brain."

This communication network, known as the gut-brain axis, is becoming the subject of more and more research, including studies examining the connection between gut health and psychiatric, mood, and stress-related disorders.

As Azab notes, the gut manufactures over 90 percent of our serotonin, and "scientists have found that gut bacteria produce many other neurotransmitters such as dopamine, norepinephrine, acetylcholine, and GABA, which are critical for mood, anxiety, concentration, reward, and motivation."

Of course, this is obvious to anyone who has ever experienced butterflies in the stomach or enjoyed the comfort of a home-cooked meal prepared with love.

About that home-cooked meal: Research has also shown that a balanced diet with a variety of plant foods is the best way to improve gut health by diversifying the microbiome.

The American Gut Project, for example, found that "those who consumed more than 30 different types of plants each week had much more diverse microbiomes than those who consumed only 10 or fewer types of plants weekly."

Read: "Largest Microbiome Study Weighs in on Our Gut Health"

Beyond your diet, you might also try a probiotic which has been clinically researched, like Just Thrive.

Try a mineral supplement to "support the integrity of tight junctions in the gut lining": ION* Gut Health.

Try quality "probiotic" foods, like raw fermented vegetables or inner-ēco Coconut Kefir.

Do you eat 30 different plans each week?

To Feel Good, You Have Options, Both Mental and Physical

The gut-brain connection proves a simple, yet profound, point about mood: to improve your mood, you have multiple options, both physical and mental.

Of course, no intervention is merely physical or mental. This dichotomy does not exist. As an extremely active person, however, I see the value in viewing mood-improvement as an equation: I may not always feel equipped to engage in an explicitly "mental" activity, like meditation, but I can engage in "physical" activity, like exercise, to improve my state of mind.

A recent study published in JAMA Psychiatry "saw a 26% decrease in odds for becoming depressed for each major increase in objectively measured physical activity."

Such physical activity does not need to be fanatical: "This increase in physical activity is what you might see on your activity tracker if you replaced 15 minutes of sitting with 15 minutes of running, or one hour of sitting with one hour of moderate activity like brisk walking."

Just gently moving throughout the day, the study authors note, can make a difference: "any kind of movement can add up to keep depression at bay."

My tip? Why not take a walk in the early morning sunshine--and improve your mood and your circadian rhythms?

Watch this clip with Satchin Panda, a sleep researcher at the Salk Institute: "How exposure to light in the evening affects mood and the circadian clock."

Your Autonomic Nervous System

The tips above, like most tips for improving mood, focus on balance. And finding a balance between mind and body is often the best way to improve your mood.

In itself, the notion of finding balance may seem esoteric, the sort of mumbo-jumbo you hear repeated in any number of "natural" health publications.

However, balance can be quantified in a precise way. One recent determinant is heart rate variability (HRV), a measure of the variation between two heartbeats.

Whether you measure your HRV or not, learning about the diagnostic tool can offer profound insights into your health.

As Marcelo Campos recently noted on the Harvard Health Blog:

"This variation is controlled by a primitive part of the nervous system called the autonomic nervous system (ANS). It works regardless of our desire and regulates, among other things, our heart rate, blood pressure, breathing, and digestion. The ANS is subdivided into two large components, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system, also known as the fight-or-flight mechanism and the relaxation response."

Read: Heart Rate Variability: A New Way to Track Well-Being

Recently, many of us have been living in a state of near-total fight-or-flight. As Campos notes:

"If we have persistent instigators such as stress, poor sleep, unhealthy diet, dysfunctional relationships, isolation or solitude, and lack of exercise, this balance may be disrupted, and your fight-or-flight response can shift into overdrive."

To halt this cycle, we have many, many options. First, we can try to change our habits.

Of course, changing a habit is hard. As Jerome Groopman notes in a New Yorker article about habits: "A large majority of us lack the self-control required to succeed in life."

However, we can "hack" our habits by "finding ways to take will-power out of the equation."

Groopman quotes a researcher who suggests creating friction--essentially making our bad habits more inconvenient. However, Groopman's article also describes another effective approach to changing habits: replace one habit with another and include rewards for the change.

Recently, instead of consuming media, for example, I try to read about wellness, denim, or JAWS. I try to talk to my children and my wife. Instead of listening or watching the news, I listen to music. I sing. I don't mean to sound trite, but I believe this is a good response to the current situation: Just sing.

Singing (or humming) stimulates the vagus nerve, which is one of the best ways to reduce stress--and to increase HRV.

Read: "Traumatic Experiences: Vagus Nerve, Microbiome, Heart Rate Variability (HRV) and Effects of Exercise"

Why not replace a stressful stimulus with an enjoyable, and altogether more human act?

Read: "This Might Be the Simplest Scientific Way to Get Rid of Stress You've Ever Heard Of"

Resources

WHOOP Strap

New York Times article on pulse oximeters

"There is a way we could identify more patients who have Covid pneumonia sooner and treat them more effectively — and it would not require waiting for a coronavirus test at a hospital or doctor’s office. It requires detecting silent hypoxia early through a common medical device that can be purchased without a prescription at most pharmacies: a pulse oximeter.

Pulse oximetry is no more complicated than using a thermometer. These small devices turn on with one button and are placed on a fingertip. In a few seconds, two numbers are displayed: oxygen saturation and pulse rate. Pulse oximeters are extremely reliable in detecting oxygenation problems and elevated heart rates."

In-Stock Pulse Oximeter: Philips Pulse Oximeter

Bristol Stool Chart

Just Thrive Probiotic

Inexpensive Blue Light Blocking Glasses

Swannies Blue Light Blocking Glasses

Quarantine Notes: To the Class of 2020

2020-04-19T10:04:00.001-04:00

The photo below was taken twenty-five-years ago on the Ocean City boardwalk.

Karen was seventeen, young and carefree. She wanted to travel around the world. She wanted to go to college. She wanted to learn several languages, to work for the United Nations.

I was eighteen, extremely serious and painfully in love. I wanted to settle down, to be with her day and night, reading and writing in some seaside cottage, completely alone. I wanted children, even then, a brood of little ones with my dark skin tone and her light hair and eyes.

My intensity alarmed Karen, especially when I dared her to match my emotions. Of course, what I wanted defied the communion at the heart of any good relationship: the coming together of two people with two radically different points of view.

But what did I know of this--of anything?

I knew I had never felt anything with such force, and although everything felt painful, songs and poems, even trees and sand, I was often moved to tears of joy by the sheer beauty of the world.

Today, I feel compelled to dismiss this ridiculous person. I knew nothing—nothing of the pain to come, the failures and woes.

Lately, however, marooned at home with Karen and our children, I am feeling my eighteen-year-old self. I am reading for hours each day. I am writing, as I did then, without expectation. I am listening to Weezer. And sometimes, perhaps on a Saturday after my third glass of wine, my urges drive me outside, where I think about my life with tears in my eyes, all that I have and all that I want.

With all these tributes to the class of 2020, I am thinking about the boyfriends and girlfriends, all the young people missing each other so deeply right now. I’m sure they’re worried about the future. Will the relationship survive? I’m sure they’re feeling the pain of isolation. I’m sure each day feels like an eternity. I feel you, young people. Hang in there.

Quarantine Notes: Trying and Failing, and Trying Again

2020-04-19T09:38:00.000-04:00

It is 10:10 on Sunday morning in Ambler. The sky framed in the window is white, the pallor of a startled face. Lately, the weather defines my mood. Sunshine feels like a gift from Apollo. On a day like today, though, I think of Camus' line from The Myth of Sisyphus: "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide."

It’s so easy to wallow. It’s so easy to find solace in trite memes. One meme says: “It's OK to not to be at your most productive during a fucking global pandemic."

But what if a “fucking global pandemic” is precisely the time to try to be productive, in any way you can?

Get dressed. Make soup. Sew a mask. Read a book. Take a walk. Take a class. Teach a class. Think. Feel. Cry. Laugh. Try and fail. Try again. Day after day.

Put another way, Camus is asking: Is life worth living? This is his answer, and the point of life right now: to try day after day, like Sisyphus, happy at the bottom of my mountain.

For me, this means waking up each day, drinking my morning tonic, getting dressed, and sitting down to write. Of course, so much happens in between, so many interactions and duties, small and large. And this is also the point and purpose of life right now: Karen, Owen, and Ella.

I've been teaching the kids Greek myths. Each day we watch a few videos, and then we take a walk and discuss what we've learned. Ella loves Athena, the goddess of wisdom. Owen loves Ares, the god of war, hated among men and gods. I love Dionysus, the god of wine and woundedness, who like the grapes from the vine, is torn apart and reborn.

We're limiting wine just now--to three or four nights a week. I sleep better. The mornings are easier. On days we do drink wine, like today, I feel the excitement of my teenage years, of which I remember so little, only the heights and depths, the laughter and tears, and the incredible momentum, which so often conveyed us to the end of a night, when the only reasonable choice was to go home. We hardly ever went home.

We miss our friends. We miss our family. We miss the easy commerce of the world: the people and things.

But we're trying not to wallow. We're trying not to scroll the news feeds, grasping for control.

It’s hard. No doubt. But we're trying not to see the fear and pain and anxiety as an excuse. What if it’s an invitation—to try harder? How else to show reverence for the lives lost? How else to honor the privilege of being alive in this moment of transition?

Each day I drink my tonic, get dressed, and sit down to write. I’m trying each day, day after day. Trying and failing, and trying again.

One Good Thing #7: I Am

2020-03-23T10:23:00.000-04:00

As I sit here writing, I hear Ella, one floor below, sprinting from room to room, creating a "school," populated with LEGOs, L.O.L Surprise Dolls, and army men. I hear Owen's shouts as he guides the army men to "the library." I can hear music, the playlists Spotify somehow uncovers from the algorithmic chaos of Ella's musical tastes: Disney songs, Imagine Dragons, Machine Gun Kelly.

Right now, I hear Phillip Phillips' "Home," a song I played on repeat around this time eight years ago, when Ella was born. I can't listen to this song without feeling the intensity of emotion from that time, the soaring happiness and the inevitable reply: the bone-deep sadness.

In his poem, “Glory,” Uncle Dean writes, "some sadness has no origin."

I often repeat this line to myself, even as I try to discover the origin—some experience or image that might clarify why I feel sad. An upsetting conversation? A photo of my grandparents? Often, I have to admit: some sadness has no origin. More often, I discover an origin, of sorts: some irrational fear.

Obviously, in recent days, I've succumbed to fear more often than usual. I try not to dwell in this fear, though I've found it can grip me for minutes or hours.

Speaking of fear, Sharon Salzberg says in a recent podcast: I realized looking at my own fear that, unlike the pronouncement, I'm afraid of the unknown, I'm actually mostly afraid when I think I *do* know--and it's going to be really bad. It's the stories I tell myself, that's gonna happen, that's gonna happen, that's gonna happen--that's when I *really* get going. And when I remind myself I *don't* know, this space opens up, and I think, 'Hey, I don't know.' Then I can relax.

As I sit here writing, Karen is drinking coffee two floors below. She is alone, browsing jewelry boxes online, enjoying a respite from the children's near-constant need for attention. We've seen the recent Jonathan Frakes Asks You Things meme, which equates Frakes' persistent odd questions to this new life at home with the kids. It's spot-on.

We're entering our seventh day of near-isolation. Throughout the past week, we've fielded an unrelenting stream of demands and proclamations from the children.

"I AM hungry!" "I want to watch something." "When is lunch?" "What can I do?" "I want a cupcake!" "I AM HUNGRY, Daddy. So MUCH." "Can I use your phone?" "If you feed me, I won't pull down my pants."

Karen is holding up admirably. Me? I give myself a solid C+.

So often, I feel my irritation cresting, and I see the children examining me, placing themselves in a holding pattern until they decipher my mood.

Is he angry? Is he sad? Is he happy?

I am all of these things, at once. Unfortunately, I often suppress my happiness, and instead, amplify my irritation, clouding the moment for the children, for Karen. Only later, often after dinner when I've had a glass or two of wine, do I see the harm of this way of being. George Saunders expresses this way succinctly in his essay, "Buddha Boy"

"You know the feeling at the end of the day, when the anxiety of that-which-I-must-do falls away and, for maybe the first time that day, you see, with some clarity, the people you love and the ways you have, during that day, slightly ignored them, turned away from them to get back to what you were doing, blurted out some mildly hurtful thing, projected, instead of the deep love you really feel, a surge of defensiveness or self-protection or suspicion? That moment when you think, Oh God, what have I done with this day? And what am I doing with my life? And how must I change to avoid catastrophic end-of-life regrets?"

Yesterday, I sat with my son on the couch, holding him tight while we watched the terrible movie, The Wrath of the Titans. He must've looked at me once or twice per minute, searching my eyes, trying to interpret my mood.

It is terrible, in a way, and almost too much to bear: this awesome responsibility I have assumed, and largely ignored, as a father, to allay my son's fears--and not to be his fear.

I think this way so often, bound as I am in what David Foster Wallace calls the "natural default setting, of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out."

But the God-honest sparkle in Owen's eyes, the enthusiasm he seemed to hold for the moment, suggested the opposite: I was not unique, or alone, at all. My son was here with me, and he was offering me what I have so often failed to give him, a refuge from my fears, a simple reminder: This is life, now, and I am here, with him.

Since that moment, I have felt a strong urge to sob outloud. But I have also felt a sense of resolve building within me. Salzberg's wisdom helps, too. I don't know what's going to happen. And that's fine. It's always been that way. For now, I am home with Owen and Ella, with Karen. I am angry. I am sad. I am happy. I am all of these things, and more. So I just keep telling myself: I am. I am. I am.

One Good Thing #6: Sulforaphane: A Powerful Plant Compound

2020-03-19T20:20:00.000-04:00

In recent years, I have experimented with a potent plant compound proven to be an effective therapeutic agent in a variety of health contexts: sulforaphane. Found in cruciferous vegetables--especially broccoli sprouts--sulforaphane is a potent activator of the NRF2 pathway, which "regulates the expression of cytoprotective proteins that protect against oxidative stress due to injury and inflammation" (source).

That last quote is from the world's foremost sulforaphane champion, Dr. Rhonda Patrick. Her podcast, Found My Fitness, is a favorite in the wellness community.

Of note for sulforaphane is her discussion with the world's foremost sulforaphane researcher, Dr. Jed Fahey, who has pioneered sulforaphane research at Johns Hopkins for several decades.

I'm not sure whether I'm proud or embarrassed to admit: I've listened to this podcast (below) too many times to count.

Sulforaphane for Coronavirus?

Sulforaphane may be a powerful part of a coronavirus prevention regime--or, potentially, a coronavirus treatment plan. Obviously, the compound has not been tested specifically for the virus, and I am not a doctor. However, I believe the evidence for taking sulforaphane as part of a healthy regime is compelling.

For prevention, sulforaphane may help boost an aging immune system, clear damaged lungs, and induce powerful detoxification pathways.

As a potential treatment, sulforaphane has shown promise in inhibiting interleukin 6, the pro-inflammatory cytokine responsible for the dreaded cytokine storm of coronavirus.

Photo Source: "How to Grow Broccoli Sprouts at Home"

Perhaps the best way to consume sulforaphane is by eating broccoli sprouts. A good alternative is a quality supplement with pure sulforaphane, like Prostaphane, which is only available in France.
Rhonda Patrick takes this supplement.

Another option is a supplement that supplies glucoraphanin, a precursor to sulforaphane. Glucoraphanin is converted into sulforaphane in the body in the presence of an enzyme, myrosinase (which can be found in mustard seeds). Fahey recommends Avmacol, which I've taken to great (anecdotal) success. I consider this supplement a core part of my family's health regime, and I encourage all my loved ones to take it--especially now.

The podcast linked below mentions the positive effects of supplementation lasting several days. I took one capsule every two or three days.

More on sulforaphane. And Rhonda Patrick's podcast with Jed Fahey...

One Good Thing #5: Moroccan Chermoula Tempeh

2020-03-18T20:16:00.000-04:00

I've just spent the last thirty minutes reading a variety of coronavirus-related articles, including recent news from South Korea, where cases have "dropped sharply" without massive shutdowns.

One suggestion: Do not Google "coronavirus positive news."

I had presumed the search engine would understand the intent of my search. Not so. For all the amazing complexity of Google's algorithm, Google delivered the exact opposite of my intent: instead of positive news, result after result of people (and a dog) who had tested positive for the virus.

Google fail.

In any case, I had a relatively good day. I went for a run. I spoke to some of my favorite students. I also spoke to my father, my sister, and my friend Henry, a comedian, actor, and longtime restaurant worker in NYC, who had made tempeh for the first time in his life last night--tempeh taco.

I often eat tempeh for lunch, and I consider myself one of the world's top tempeh advocates. Tempeh is essentially a fermented soybean cake with a unique chewy texture that rivals certain meat products.

I'm not going to make any special claims about the health properties of tempeh (as opposed to other unfermented soy products), but I will say, anecdotally, that I've found it to be a delicious, sustaining, and incredibly easy-to-digest source of plant protein. Also, tempeh has appreciably more protein and fiber than tofu.

Read: "Tempeh vs. Tofu"

Today, in the spirit of trying new ways of eating (and using resources), I want to share my all time favorite tempeh recipe: Moroccan Chermoula Tempeh.

This recipe is adapted from Peter Berley's magnificent book, The Modern Vegetarian Kitchen. I've made it for public events, for legions of friends and private cooking clients, and, of course, for my family and children, who often trade their precious nuggets for tempeh.

Try it. I think you might like it. And lord knows--the supermarkets aren't running out of tempeh any time soon.

An All-Time Great Cookbook: Peter Berley's Vegetarian Kitchen (Photo Source)

Moroccan Chermoula Tempeh

½ cup extra virgin olive oil
½ cup water
6 tablespoons fresh-squeezed lemon juice
1 teaspoon sweet paprika
1 teaspoon ground cumin
½ teaspoon cayenne pepper
½ cup chopped cilantro
1 1/2 teaspoons Celtic sea salt
4 garlic cloves, crushed
1 pound organic tempeh, sliced in one-inch cubes

Preheat oven to 300 degrees.

Combine olive oil, water, lemon juice, spices, cilantro, salt, and garlic in a medium bowl and whisk well. Place tempeh cubes in a 9-inch baking pan and pour marinade over tempeh. Cover with tin foil and bake for 60 minutes.

Uncover and bake for 10 minutes, until browned. Serve with white basmati rice.

One Good Thing #4: Gatsby's SCHEDULE

2020-03-17T16:11:00.001-04:00

Yesterday, three days into my project, I failed to write "One Good Thing." I was feeling ill, a supremely eerie sensation at this time, and though I wasn't experiencing ominous symptoms, I felt incapable of even the smallest tasks, let alone writing.

Instead, I spent my time on the couch, trying to read The Great Gatsby, trying (and failing) to recover my lost sense of optimism.

I was sixteen, staying in Stone Harbor with my mother’s family, when one night after a pasta dinner, my Uncle Dean suggested I read Gatsby. At the time, he called it “the greatest novel ever.”

Dean had a copy of Gatsby on him, a paperback from my great Aunt Gloria. That night, I pulled my mattress onto the deck, flopped down, and under the yellow glow of an outdoor bulb, read Gatsby cover to cover,

When I rose with the sun the next morning, I was a different person, inspired as much by Gatsby’s “extraordinary gift for hope” as his “Platonic conception of self.”

Nurturing the delusion that I am of the Gatsby ilk, I’ve since read Gatsby every few summers, yet only in recent years, well into my forties, have I acknowledged: I’m more Nick Carraway.

That first summer, however, I fancied myself equal parts Carraway and Gatsby, half wry spectator, half extravagant striver, and since then I have tried to model my days on the optimism of young Jay Gatsby (née Gatz)--specifically, his SCHEDULE, the detailed account of his daily regime, printed at the back of a book called Hopalong Cassidy, and his GENERAL RESOLVES:

We had looked to yesterday to be the first day of our SCHEDULE. We had planned to outline our days by the hour, noting times for homeschooling, work, and play. But I was sick, and we failed.

Writhing in failure, I was comforted to see that many, many others online felt the same way. Day One: abject failure. A colleague from Villanova relayed a telling anecdote from a student:

"A nursing student I'm working with has little ones popping in and out of the Zoom. She said she has no idea what time it is. Fed them lunch and her husband said: we're having lunch at 3???"

But today is a new day, and tomorrow. In this, I'm taking inspiration from another source, decidedly less optimistic but perhaps more appropriate for the moment: Samuel Beckett.

At the end of his novel, The Unnamable, Beckett offers the only advice I can take right now: "You must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on."

One Good Thing #3: The Value of Boredom

2020-03-15T20:10:00.000-04:00

My daughter Ella celebrated her eighth birthday yesterday.

When I was eight-years-old, I was a student at the Lancaster Waldorf school, the only school I'd known, and my day-to-day experience was not much different from my daughter's. I went to school, I came home. I lived for the weekends, for summer. Even then, I recall my middle childhood as a time of profound boredom punctuated by rare shots of excitement.

I cannot say whether all young children share this experience. My son Owen seems to live a life of near-constant excitement or agitation, of ceaseless energy.

But Ella is much like me as a young child: She dwells in boredom.

Ella's refuge, like everyone these days, is the screen: the games she plays on my iPhone, games like Minecraft and Roblox, which strike me, whenever I happen to look at the screen, as pointless and ugly.

Ella loves these games. Whenever she's played for some time, I can see in her eyes the serene, drugged look of an addict at the peak of her high, and whenever I attempt to take the phone away she lashes out in uncharacteristic ways, crying with outrage.

It's a terrible moment, when I force boredom upon her. Yet so often her boredom is generative, a space where imagination is made of necessity, where her own thoughts have the capacity to delight even in the midst of the most mundane of afternoons.

Bored

Very often, of course, Ella's boredom leads to an impulse to create.

In the coming weeks, we'll all have to lean into boredom, and I suspect, as usual, that despite my intentions, I will end up looking to my young daughter for inspiration and succor--instead of the other way around.

Below is a sampling of the fruits of Ella's boredom, beginning with her advice to herself for boredom...

You are bored so follow these rules: read, color, think, think about life,
if you have enough time, watch something

Screenplay: Written with Julia and Emma

Ella filled each page of this tiny notebook with a tiny drawing

Ella's first book: Sad (from the "Feeling Series")

The protagonist (?) of Sad

Five Bold Predictions for the Future: Balls will change, no more cars, new food, cool jobs, huge foods

One Good Thing #2: Ella's Birthday

2020-03-14T20:37:00.003-04:00

Based on the current numbers of cases and fatalities, the death rate of the virus is about 3.7%. I admit: Until today, I had found comfort in these seemingly low numbers--without thinking about the human consequence.

A single death is a tragedy--for a family, a community.

This fact is most apparent when celebrating a birthday. Today is Ella's 8th birthday. We celebrated at our house, with our family. Mom-Mom and Pop-Pop came from Brigantine. Aunt Chuck came from Lancaster. And, of course, the local family was here: Ella's grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins.

It was lovely to commune with the family, young and old. At first, we tiptoed around each other.

"Are we hugging?" we asked.

Hours later, as the party ended, we embraced each other without hesitation.

As I write now, with little time and much later than expected, Ella and Owen sit on the couch with their cousin Olivia watching Boss Baby. Karen is on her way home with chocolate ice cream and way too much wine. Soldier on, I keep thinking. Stay positive.

Happy birthday, Ella. We love you.

One Good Thing #1: Just Sing

2020-03-13T15:00:00.003-04:00

Yesterday Pennsylvania's governor, Tom Wolf, announced several "guidance" measures for Montogomery County, including the closures of all schools, child care centers, and all non-essential retail facilities for two weeks. When I heard the news, I envisioned a Rocky training montage.

In the next two weeks, I hope to stay positive--for myself, my family, and my community--by spending time with the people I love, exercising in new ways, reading new books, cooking new recipes, and writing.

Also, to combat the moral panic of the coronavirus (for myself and, perhaps, others) I plan to post "one good thing" each day.

Too Much Media?

Since the outbreak of the coronavirus, I have surprised myself with my resiliency to anxiety. Only a few years ago, starting after Trump's election, I lived in near-constant anger, fear, and anxiety. For the first time in my life, I experienced panic attacks.

I attributed my anxiety to the chaos of our life at home with two small children, which felt like an assault on my nervous system. I eventually realized something far more insidious at the core of my anxiety. I realized this during the Kavanaugh trial, in September 2018, on a Friday evening, on the day Jeff Flake made his momentous decision, delaying Kavanaugh's nomination--for a week or so.

I had been listening to the coverage for most of the morning, ignoring the habits that make my Fridays (my day off) feel so important: reading and writing. Instead of engaging the creative part of my brain, I had obsessively cleaned while watching/listening to the coverage on my CNN app.

That night at dinner, I compulsively checked my phone even as I spoke to Karen about the hearing. The children, tired after a long day at school, vied for our attention.

At one point, I heard Ella speaking, as if from a distance. "Daddy?" she said. "Daddy?"

Looking at her, I realized I had completely ignored whatever she had said, and with the clarity of an insight I understood: I was wasting my life. Over the course of the following weeks, I decided to back away from the relentless Kavanaugh coverage. To do so, I limited my exposure to social media. I deleted all social media apps from my phone. I stopped turning on NPR first thing in the morning.

One Good Thing: Just Sing

Despite my recent resiliency, I still modulate my media consumption. This strategy may be the single most important part of my wellness regime: I never watch the news and I rarely listen to the news.

I only occasionally read the news, about one to two articles per day: enough to know what I need to know.

In recent days, I have comforted myself with the well-known statistics about the percentage of coronavirus cases that prove to be mild, as well as the seemingly low death rates for those below 80. Yes, I have been disturbed by the administration's slow response, as well as the consistent onslaught of negative news about mass contagion and economic ruin.

It wasn't until this morning, though, that I felt truly anxious. I made the dreadful decision to read an article in the Times about two young Chinese women, both infected with the virus. One survived. One died. After reading, it took several hours to regain my equilibrium.

I had to remind myself again: I must modulate my media exposure. Just turn it off.

Changing a habit is hard. As Jerome Groopman notes in a New Yorker article about habits: "A large majority of us lack the self-control required to succeed in life."

However, we can "hack" our habits by "finding ways to take will-power out of the equation."

Groopman quotes a researcher who suggests creating friction--essentially making our bad habits more inconvenient. This is presumably one reason why my media detox initially worked so well for me: I deleted the apps.

However, Groopman's article also describes another effective approach to changing habits: replace one habit with another and include rewards for the change.

Instead of consuming media, I try to read about wellness, denim, or JAWS. I try to talk to my children and my wife. Instead of listening or watching the news, I listen to music. I sing. I don't mean to sound trite, but I believe this is a good response to the current situation: Just sing.

Singing (or humming) stimulates the vagus nerve, which is one of the best ways to reduce stress. Why not replace a stressful stimulus with an enjoyable, and altogether more human act?

Read: "This Might Be the Simplest Scientific Way to Get Rid of Stress You've Ever Heard Of"

A Perfect Recipe: Chocolate Truffles with Coconut Milk

2020-02-14T10:04:00.001-05:00

Carl Jung, among others, saw alchemy as something more: a symbolic system for spiritual transformation. The great alchemists, he noted, were not really working to transforms metal, but to transform their own souls, from a lead-like state of ignorance to one of golden enlightenment.

The preparation of chocolate can be compared to alchemy: the astringent, bitter and otherwise bland seeds of a tropical tree are transformed into a dense, smooth, and somewhat sweet food, with an unrivaled, complex taste—a golden food.

Chocolate is a transformative food, capable of igniting passion and romance and fervor. When we work with chocolate, we embody Jung’s idea of the ancient alchemists. In this case, the asserted aim of our work is to transmute the raw ingredients into food, but the real aim of our work is to inspire romance and bravado.

I first encountered chocolate bravado in Barcelona; now that I am back in the states I find myself dreaming of a return to that city, to the famous pastry shop, Escriba, where, one morning I saw two gorgeous women sharing a chocolate cake with a beast of a man. The beast was clad in black leather from head to toe. The trio looked as if they were on the tail end of a long night, and they smoked while they ate, purposefully, as if they were battling for a last chance at recognition. It was my first day in Barcelona and it was my first sight of a Catalan. I couldn’t explain to myself why I felt so amazed. Nor could I tear my eyes away from the enormity of the piece of chocolate cake the beast was eating.

He stopped and returned my gaze. Then, with the odd braggadocio of someone who is still drunk, he pointed at my plate and laughed.

I was eating a granola bar.

I was not so interested in chocolate back then.

Still, even then, I had the impression, looking upon this monster in leather, that I was witnessing a stellar engagement—the same engagement that hits me now, every evening, after eating my final meal of the day, when I sit down to eat a truffle, lovingly made, and I sense the absurd affinity that humankind has developed for chocolate--a relationship initiated by an Aztec king and propagated ever since, by kings and lovers alike.

Montezuma reputedly had an absurd affinity for chocolate According to reports left by the Spanish conquistadors, he drank as many as 50 cups of chocolate a day. Apparently, he needed the chocolate. Montezuma had hundreds of lovers. Chocolate was his Viagra.

Chocolate is the food of the sensual monster.

Picasso, the monster, reputedly fed his children dinners made entirely of chocolate desserts.
Coconut Chocolate Truffles

Chocolate truffles are easy to make; they are also shockingly delicious. Here, I replace the traditional heavy cream with coconut cream, a healthy source of fat and another source of sensual allure. You can also roll the truffles in cocoa powder or chopped nuts, like pistachios.

½ c. coconut milk (coconut milk must be full-fat; try Thai Kitchen's)
8 oz. bittersweet chocolate, coarsely chopped (For truffles, I prefer Chocolove Chocolate; or Endangered Species' Supreme Dark Bar)
1/2 cup dried coconut

Place chopped chocolate in a medium-sized bowl. Create a double boiler by placing bowl over a simmering pot of water. Gently melt the chocolate.

Pour coconut milk into a medium saucepan and bring to a gentle simmer over medium-low heat. Remove from heat, let cool slightly, and pour over chocolate. Gently stir until smooth, chocolate is completely melted, and coconut milk is incorporated.

Rest until firm, 1-3 hours.

Place coconut into a bowl. Using a measuring spoon, scoop up 1 teaspoon of chocolate, and quickly roll into a ball about 3/4 inch across. Drop into coconut; roll each truffle to coat.

Let rest until firm, 30 minutes.

Store in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks.

"Wanna get drunk and fool around?"

2020-02-14T09:24:00.002-05:00

"Wanna get drunk and fool around."

- Ellen Brody (Lorrain Grey), JAWS

"There seems no reason except mere habit why...we should not go barefoot"

2020-01-16T13:31:00.002-05:00

"As to the feet, which have been condemned to their leathern coffins so long that we are almost ashamed to look at them, there is still surely a resurrection possible for them. There seems to be no reason except mere habit why, for a large part of the year, at least, we should not go barefoot, as the Irish do, or at least with sandals. [Democracy, which redeems the lowest and most despised of the people, must redeem also the most menial and despised members and organs of the body.]"

~Edward Carpenter, 19th century English progressive writer (repost from the wonderful menswear blog, Die Workwear!)

A Perfect Recipe: Roast Potatoes

2019-06-04T15:33:00.003-04:00

Delicious recipes often sacrifice health for flavor. And "healthy" recipes often sacrifice flavor for perceived health benefits. Can you maximize flavor and health? I believe so. The "perfect" recipe series explores the recipes I've developed over twenty years as a passionate home cook, personal caterer, and recipe developer.

The perfect roast potato begins with baking soda. As far as I know, Cook's Illustrated introduced this idea in 2012, in its home fries recipe, which follows a simple premise: parboiling peeled and cut russet potatoes in water with baking soda creates the necessary alkaline conditions to break down the surface area of the potato. The more surface area, the more oil can later adhere to the potato; when cooked at a high temperature, the abundant oiled surface area creates a crispy exterior.

Kenji of Serious Eats also suggests baking soda (though he originally suggested vinegar, which produced sketchy results) in his "crispy roast potatoes" recipe.

The recipe below, for perfect roast potatoes, is essentially an amalgam of the Cooks Illustrated and Serious Eats recipes with my own (somewhat healthy) tweaks.

Simple ingredients: organic russet potatoes, baking soda, and Celtic sea salt. We cut our potatoes in wedges to make the best oven-roasted potatoes you've ever tasted.

The Best High Heat Cooking Oil?

To make a truly excellent, crispy home fry, roasted potato, or oven-baked French fry recipe, you need abundant fat and high heat. Many of my recipes try to reduce the impact of high heat on fats--especially extra virgin olive oil or butter. But there's no getting around the need for high heat in this recipe.

Heat oxidizes fats, creating harmful free radicals, and conventional wisdom associates an oil's "smoke point" with the production of harmful free radicals. When a fat is heated past its smoke point, the wisdom goes, the fat will become unstable, releasing free radicals into your food.

Conventional wisdom has also classified the best "high heat" oils based on the oil's composition. Saturated fats, like coconut oil, are thought to be more stable than polyunsaturated fats, like sunflower oil, or monounsaturated fats, like extra virgin olive oil.

EVOO, especially, has been classified as a poor high heat oil due to its low smoke point. As the Bulletproof Blog notes:

"Saturated fats are super stable because their tails don’t have an opening where a free radical can grab an electron and oxidize the fat – the tails are already filled up (“saturated”). That’s not to say that monounsaturated (MUFA; one opening) and polyunsaturated (PUFA; many openings) fats are bad for you. These fats can be a great addition to your cooking arsenal too. Just be gentler with them so you don’t oxidize the more fragile MUFAs and PUFAs."

This "conventional wisdom" is not supported by science.

A recent study out of Australia, for example, found that smoke point "does not predict oil performance," and that extra virgin olive oil yielded the lowest levels of harmful compounds when heated and compared to other common oils, like canola, grapeseed, and even coconut oil. The study posits that extra virgin olive oil is stable due to its high levels of antioxidants and polyphenols.

To this last point, too, conventional wisdom states that extra virgin olive oil loses its antioxidants and polyphenols when heated to high temperatures. But this myth was dispelled by another, older study, which found "that despite the heating conditions, [EVOO] maintained most of its minor compounds and, therefore, most of its nutritional properties."

I remember reading this study when I worked at Whole Foods, during a time when I was experimenting with coconut oil for high heat. Unfortunately, unlike coconut milk (which I use in my mashed potatoes and mashed sweet potato recipes), coconut oil can appreciably (and negatively, I think) influence the taste of a dish. So I decided on the spot: No more. I'll only use extra virgin olive oil.

My recommendation today: Use extra virgin olive oil for high heat cooking.

In the recipe below, I use grassfed butter and extra virgin olive oil. Again, since smoke point does not necessarily determine fat degradation, I think extra virgin olive oil and grassfed butter make the best one-two punch for cooking.

Acrylamides and the Maillard Rection

Is this a "healthy" recipe? Not necessarily. Eating traditional high heat cooked potato recipes (like French fries) may double the risk of early death. And any starchy food cooked at high heat--in pursuit of the cook's beloved "Maillard reaction"--creates acrylamides, a known human nuerotoxin linked to cancer.

However, although people like Dr. Mercola talk about acrylamides in French fries as if they're a veritable poison, the evidence so far has failed to find a link between acrylamide exposure in food and cancer.

I do try to reduce my family's exposure to acrylamides by cooking most recipes low and slow, or by simply minimizing cooking, when possible. That said, the point of this recipe is to eat a healthier version of high-heat cooked potatoes. Make this recipe once or twice a month, on days that you exercise very hard--and enjoy it.

Perfect Roasted Potatoes

Pre-heating the baking sheet in the oven is a crucial step here. And don't crowd the potatoes on the pan. If necessary (and possible) use two pans (adding additional oil to the second pan, as necessary). The timing of this recipe can be dramatically different, depending on your oven. In my oven, the recipe takes about 25 minutes from start to finish. You may need to adjust the timing for your oven.

3.5 pounds organic russet potatoes, peeled and cut into quarters or eighths, depending on size
Celtic Sea Salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
3 tablespoons grassfed butter
2-3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil (to coat pan)

Adjust oven rack to lowest position and preheat oven to 450°F (or 400-425°F for convection, depending on your oven's convection settings). Place a large rimmed baking sheet on the rack.

Combine peeled and cut potatoes, baking soda, 1/2 teaspoon Celtic sea salt, and 2 quarts water in a large pot. Heat over high until simmering. (Warning: the baking soda may cause the water to overflow, so watch the pot). Simmer for two minutes. Drain potatoes carefully in the pot (by straining water through the lid).

Place the potatoes in the pot back on the stove over low heat. Add the butter and 1/2 teaspoon Celtic sea salt. Stir until the butter is melted and the potatoes develop a thick mashed-like paste.

Carefully remove pre-heated baking sheet from oven. Add oil to coat the pan (make sure entire surface area is coated with oil). Add potatoes to pan, spreading evenly without overcrowding.

Transfer to oven and roast, without moving, for 10 (or more) minutes. With tongs or a fine metal spatula, check to see if potatoes are browned and can easily be flipped. When you can easily dislodge the potatoes, flip, and place the pan back in the oven, roasting until all potatoes are golden brown, 10-20 additional minutes (or more).

Keep the potatoes on the pan, and sprinkle with more sea salt to taste. Serve immediately.

Nietzsche: "Madness, that I may only at last believe in myself!"

2019-01-29T14:06:00.000-05:00

I came across the following quote in Sue Prideaux's wonderful new Nietzsche biography, I am Dynamite! It's a selection from Nietzsche's book Daybreak, which Prideaux presents as the beginning of his mature philosophy. It reads to me like a credo (from a man who has experienced pain).

"All superior men who were irresistibly drawn to throw off the yoke of any kind of morality and to frame new laws had, if they were not actually mad, no alternative but to make themselves or pretend to be mad...How can one make oneself mad when one is not mad and does not dare to appear so?...Ah, give me madness, you heavenly powers! Madness, that I may only at last believe in myself! Give deliriums and convulsions, sudden lights and darkness, terrify me with frost and fire such as no mortal has ever felt, with deafening din and prowling figures, make me howl and whine and crawl like a beast: so that I may come to believe myself! I am consumed by doubt, I have killed the law, the law anguishes me as a corpse does a living man; if I am not more than the law I am the vilest of all men."

Knausgård: "The easy life is nothing to aspire to."

2018-08-17T14:34:00.000-04:00

Two companionable quotes from Karl Ove Knausgård's wonderful book, Spring, which I've read three times this summer--twice in succession, and one more time a month later.

I'm only now emerging from a two-year Knausgård binge, when I read the first five books of his My Struggle series each at least twice, and some three or four times. I'll officially end the binge this September, around my birthday, when I read book six.

The following quote is a good example of what I like about Knausgård, comma splices and all. He is honest and vulnerable, I think, and I can easily share his sentiment--I've had these same thoughts without precisely articulating them to myself.

That said, I don't need to post another picture of Knausgård on the Internet. So I'll post a picture of the kids.

This passage, in essence, is written for Knausgård's own children, and specifically to his youngest daughter, who he addresses directly throughout Spring.

"But maybe these were just excuses, something I said to comfort myself. For that’s how it is, we cover up our mistakes and failings, we invent stories that put ourselves in a more favorable light. Self-deception is perhaps the most human thing of all."

"Self-deception isn’t a lie, it’s a survival mechanism. You too will deceive yourself, it’s just a question of to what degree, and the only advice I can give you is to try to remember that others may see and experience the same things as you in an entirely different way, and that they have as much right to their viewpoint as you do.

"But it is difficult. It may be the most difficult thing of all. Because it is just as important to be true to yourself, to hold on to your beliefs and think your own thoughts, not other people’s. It’s so easy to walk into one picture of reality and then let that picture sway you, even though on certain points it goes against what you really feel, experience, and believe. What do you do then? The easiest thing is to adjust your feelings, experiences, and thoughts, for a picture of reality is both simpler and more pleasant to relate to than reality itself. This brings us back to self deception, the most human thing of all.

"And perhaps the following is nothing but self deception: the easy life is nothing to aspire to, the easy choice is never the worthiest solution, only the difficult life is worth living. I don’t know. But I think that’s how it is. What would seem to contradict this, is that I wish you and your siblings simple, easy, long and happy lives."

Bad Boy

2018-07-17T13:53:00.001-04:00

This Saturday we returned from Sea Isle, the Jersey beach town where we vacation each year with Karen's family. We stayed on 48th Street, steps away from the boardwalk, which stretches north to south from 57th street to 29th street, a span I ran, up and back, a mile and a half each way, every other day.

On our final morning in town, a hot Friday, I walked with Owen and Ella and their cousin Katherine to the Island Breeze Casino, on 37th Street, where the kids spent quarter after quarter on the claw machines and various other games with impossible-to-master directives, which all issued strips of five, ten, or possibly twenty tickets as a sort of consolation for defeat.

This pittance of tickets, of course, could later be traded for the mementos one expects from these places: Whoopie cushions, plastic green army men, or the Pinky Hi-Bounce Balls I remember from my childhood vacations in Stone Harbor, when my brother and I tossed the balls back in forth in the water, crashing ourselves into the waves, making the easiest of catches seem impossible.

We got all of these mementos and more, for we won, incredibly, thousands of tickets.

On a whim, to assuage my growing impatience, I put a quarter in Owen's favored game: a truck game, whose purpose was to shoot a quarter down a slot into one of three truck's trailers, each overflowing with quarters. If you hit the trailer, you won some tickets. I aimed at the trailer, but I hit a lever which forced one of the trucks to dump its load.

The game issued an alarm. Lights flashed. Owen looked at me, confused.

"Uh oh," I said, smiling.

When the tickets came, a seemingly endless train, Katherine and Ella came running from a nearby game. We stood watching, laughing, gathering the tickets in our hands.

Owen jumped in place, excited, his fists balled at his sides, but I sensed his confusion, even alarm, when I said, "When will it end?"

He looked at me, then, and I realized he was worried.

Had we done something bad? Had we broke the machine?

At least since he could speak, Owen has expressed a fascination with the distinction between good and bad. When playing any sort of imaginary game, he assumes the part of the bad guy. Darth Vader. Ultron. Sinestro. He relishes the war, the mayhem and destruction--I've taught him to associate all of this with "bad guys."

Yet I recall more than a few seminal moments from his early youth, when I shouted, in frustration, "bad boy."

And now, I think, he has internalized those accusations and my attendant anger, for he clearly wants to be a good boy. He often feels compelled to say, "Daddy, I'm good." And he often asks me, "Daddy, am I being good?"

So it was at the arcade. I could see Owen trying to interpret my mood, placing himself in a holding pattern until he knew, for sure, my emotional state. Had something bad happened? Was I angry?

I realized, then, that he'd been doing this for some time, looking at me at opportune moments, and that I had likely clouded many moments for him, for I am so often a melancholy, rueful person, and I can not help but reveal my emotions.

This moment at the arcade returned to me on Saturday night, our first night home, when I sat with Owen on the couch watching his"videos" about the heroes and villains of America's superhero culture, all enacted with the little Imaginext and Play Skool figurines he collects. Marvel. Star Wars. D.C. Comics. This video happened to be about Batman and Mr. Freeze.

I have been a vocal opponent of these videos. "They make you crazy," I have told Owen. I usually forbid him to watch them, but vacation with his doting extended family had normalized the devices, for the time being, and now Owen was experiencing an unprecedented moment: He was welcoming his father into his own world.

As we watched, he continued to glance at me, searching my eyes, gauging my reaction moment-by-moment. The sincerity of his probing expression. The hope he seemed to hold, which battled his fear, which I guessed to be of my disapproval, or worse, my outright dismissal.

"Look," I said to him, finally, my eyes widening. "That's so cool."

"So cool," he said, burrowing his body close to mine.

The Perfect Diet

2018-06-27T09:47:00.000-04:00

In America views on healthful eating fall on a spectrum defined by two opposing ideologies. On one side, people like Dr. Mercola, Sally Fallon (founder of the Weston A. Price Foundation) and Professor Loren Cordain (founder of the "Paleo Diet") recommend the consumption of high quality animal-based foods, such as grass-fed beef, wild salmon, or raw grassfed butter. This side also typically advocates abundant raw vegetables and fermented foods. Excessive fruit consumption and grains, on the other hand, are discouraged. (The Weston A. Price foundation advocates soaked and cooked grains.)

On the other side, people like T. Colin Campbell, the author of The China Study, Dr. Dean Ornish, and Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn argue that animal-based products create disease, that there are virtually no nutrients in animal-based foods that are not better provided by plants, and that the best health-promoting diet is a low-fat, vegetable and grain-based diet--a vegan diet.
The diversity of information can be confusing. The Paleo Diet turns to pre-agricultural history to suggest a diet reminiscent of our hunter and gatherer ancestors: Paleolithic humans. Inspired by a 1985 study on Paleolithic nutrition published in The New England Journal of Medicine, and perhaps more famously by Jared Diamond's 1987 article "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race," the Paleo diet argues, essentially, that the human race, a product of millions of years of evolution, has not yet evolved the ability to digest and assimilate the products of agriculture: most notably, grains, beans, and legumes.

Diamond's article is not entirely about diet. He argues, for example, that the development of agriculture was a "mistake" because, when compared to our foraging ancestors, civilized people have suffered far more war, famine, and disease. In terms of diet, however, Diamond suggests the varied diet enjoyed by hunter-gatherers was superior to civilized people's dependence on limited crops. To support his claim, he cites evidence from the fossil record: a post-agricultural decline in height of Greek and Turkish people; a 50% increase in tooth defects; a fourfold increase in anemia; and a threefold increase in bone lesions among Indians.

This idea was not necessarily novel. In 1939, Weston Price had published a book, Nutritional and Physical Degeneration, that detailed a series of ethnographic studies based on diverse indigenous populations across the globe. Price claimed that diseases typical of Western culture did not exist in non-Western indigenous cultures, but as indigenous cultures adopted Western diets, they showed increases in Western diseases, specifically in dental caries (Weston A. Price was a dentist).

Price's findings were lauded and reviled. As Wikipedia notes, one journal called Price "The Charles Darwin of Nutrition." Yet, "a review in the Journal of the American Medical Association also disagreed with the significance of this nutritional research, noting Price was 'observant but not wholly unbiased' and that his approach was 'evangelistic rather than scientific.' "

Meanwhile, years later, as Jared Diamond was setting the anthropological world aflame--I still recall my first anthropology class in college, how my teacher spoke about Diamond's claims with heated passion, a passion still burning today--T. Colin Campbell was conducting his now-famous study. In 1983, he initiated initiated The China Project, "the most comprehensive study of nutrition ever," as his book on the study claims.

Campbell's basic premise, that traditional rural Chinese diets are more healthful than the diets enjoyed by the industrialized parts of China, agrees with Price's comparison between Western and non-Western indigenous diets.

However, Campbell comes to an opposing conclusion: Diets high in animal protein are linked to "the diseases of affluence"--heart disease, cancer, and diabetes.

So two very influential voices on nutrition, based on similar findings, come to completely different conclusions.

Obviously, Campbell's research, conducted over the course of twenty years, and jointly by Cornell University, Oxford University, and the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine seems much more valid than the ethnographic studies of a dentist. And yet, there is still no consensus on what constitutes a healthy diet.

Nevertheless, grains and grain-based diets now dominate the world. Recently, too, the USDA introduced a new food pyramid, advocating more "Whole Grains."

***

Most of these diets apply a blanket philosophy to a unique experience. A "whole grain" diet, for example, might be appropriate for some (say, those suffering from heart disease) and disastrous for others (a celiac, for example; or one who otherwise might have trouble digesting grains).

Some of these ideologies do come somewhat closer to addressing the individual’s unique needs. Within the context of his somewhat limited view of healthful eating, for example, Dr. Mercola states that "one person’s food may be another person’s poison," and advocates a personalized nutrition plan. The "Eat Right for Your Type" diet encourages people to eat certain foods and avoid others based on their blood type.

When faced with bewildering possibilities, I try to seek the first possibility—the source.

In diet, the source might refer to your ancestry and culture, as well as your environment—both local and bacterial. The source might also refer, of course, to your own body or body type.

What foods are best suited to your constitution?

What foods will best fuel your unique lifestyle?

More importantly, what foods do you enjoy? What foods do you digest easily? What foods make you feel powerful, or light, or healthy?

Discovering the answers to these questions can have a tremendously beneficial influence on your relationship with food. These answers will help you see past the confusion of "diets."

These answers might even help you discover your own perfect diet.

What Did Your Ancestors Eat and Why?

When I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, at twenty-six, I learned that those from an Ashkenazi background suffered an increased rate of the illness.

I wondered, then, if the Ashkenazi diet might have contributed to the disease; or, perhaps the diet had evolved to counteract digestive problems. A general survey offered no definitive answer. To discover the truth, I had to go to the actual source: my grandparents. What I discovered was that my ancestors, indeed, had suffered a history of digestive problems, and that to combat these problems they had learned to avoid certain foods, such as raw foods, and had naturally gravitated to easier-to-digest foods, such as chicken, chicken fat (schmaltz), white rice, sourdough bread, and kasha.

At the time of this discovery, I was a vegetarian who ate a predominantly raw-food diet. I, however, did not feel sufficiently motivated to adapt my diet—a terrible mistake, which led, I believe, to years of needless suffering, and eventually to a diagnosis of type-1 diabetes. I often wonder: How might my life had been different had I paid attention to the wisdom of my ancestor’s diet—to what my ancestors had to tell me about diet?

What is Your Local Food Culture?

The Bronx, Queens, or Long Island Sound,
Even other states come right and exact,
It ain't where you're from, it's where you're at.

~Erik B. & Rakim

Culture is an amalgam of influences, including ancestry, but our food culture is often defined more comprehensively by our local environment: the weather and the people, the soil and the preoccupations of the people, the landscape and the music, even the bacteria.

You might view your food culture as it relates to local food: the food grown, cooked, and enjoyed close to your home.

But what does "local" mean?

Food grown in your garden is the most local. Then, food grown in your community, state, region, and country might be considered local. For certain parts of the year, or for products that thrive locally, it may be possible to buy close to home. At other times, or for less common products, an expanded reach may be required. During the winter, our best "local" fruit option (here in the Philadelphia region) may be Florida’s citrus fruits.

The best way engage with your local food culture is to buy and cook local produce. Local produce offers an introduction to eating seasonally—and an excellent way to learn about local agriculture. You might also seek local meat or dairy.

In Pennsylvania, a great resource for local food is the website Buy Fresh Buy Local. In the Philadelphia region, we’re lucky to call Fair Food Philly our own. The Fair Food website (www.fairfoodphilly.org) describes their mission like this: "At Fair Food, we dedicate ourselves to bringing healthy local food to the marketplace and promoting a humane, sustainable agriculture system for the region."

How Does Environment Influence Your Diet?

Across the world, various cultures have adapted idiosyncratic diets in response to environment. Traditionally, Inuits consume an average of 75% of their daily energy intake from fat. An article in Discover Magazine described the circumstances shaping this diet:

"Shaped by glacial temperatures, stark landscapes, and protracted winters, the traditional Eskimo diet had little in the way of plant food, no agricultural or dairy products, and was unusually low in carbohydrates."

To the typical American view, this does not necessarily seem like the healthiest diet. Many doctors have apparently linked high-fat diets with disease. (An important caveat in evaluating any food-related study: what was the food source?) And yet, traditionally, Inuits enjoyed great health. The Discover Magazine article calls this the "Inuit Paradox."

"What the diet of the Far North illustrates...is that there are no essential foods—only essential nutrients. And humans can get those nutrients from diverse and eye-opening sources. One might, for instance, imagine gross vitamin deficiencies arising from a diet with scarcely any fruits and vegetables. What furnishes vitamin A, vital for eyes and bones? We derive much of ours from colorful plant foods, constructing it from pigmented plant precursors called carotenoids (as in carrots). But vitamin A, which is oil soluble, is also plentiful in the oils of cold-water fishes and sea mammals, as well as in the animals’ livers, where fat is processed. These dietary staples also provide vitamin D, another oil-soluble vitamin needed for bones. Those of us living in temperate and tropical climates, on the other hand, usually make vitamin D indirectly by exposing skin to strong sun—hardly an option in the Arctic winter—and by consuming fortified cow’s milk, to which the indigenous northern groups had little access until recent decades and often don’t tolerate all that well."

Your Bacterial Ecosystem: The Most Local Environment Possible

The human body is saturated with microbes. As the New Yorker states, "Nearly all DNA in our bodies belongs to microorganisms: they outnumber our cells nine to one."

You might look at your body, inside and out, as a microbial ecosystem. This ecosystem is not dependent on genes, however: it is entirely dependent on environment. NPR reports:

"Whose genes matter most to you? Your mom's? Your dad's? Or genes inside the trillions of bacteria living in your intestine, your mouth, your nasal passages and a lot of places we'd rather not mention? The answer: Obviously, your parents' genes matter, but it turns out we humans have two sets of genes in us: the ones we inherited from our human ancestors and the ones that walk in through our mouths starting when we're just hours old…Not surprisingly, a person who grows up in Argentina and another who grows up in northern Alaska tend to acquire different bacteria in their intestines and mouths — and, stunningly, these differences seem to matter."

This might account for why cultures not only eat different foods but their digestive systems use these foods in different ways. The Inuits eat more fat than most populations "but their gastrointestinal systems apparently are more capable of breaking fats down for use by their bodies."

It is important to remember: Most bacteria are not harmful, although some bacteria can have negative influences. It is important that the balance of microbes be maintained to favor a diversity of bacteria over the potentially opportunistic ones. This is why probiotics may be helpful--by increasing the diversity of bacteria in your gut.

The science supporting the use of probiotics is impressive. The gut is a prominent part of the immune system. Several fascinating recent studies (like this one) indicate that supplementation with probiotics can positively influence the immune system. This might be especially helpful for those suffering from auto-immune conditions, like type-1 diabetes, ulcerative colitis, psoriasis, or rheumatoid arthritis.

The gut also plays a prominent role in mood--a recent famous study suggests that the presence of absence of probiotics might even modulate mood (I’ve personally found this to be true). Probiotics might also have an effect on weight.

The Art of Not Eating

2018-06-19T14:40:00.000-04:00

A few years ago, my good friend Kevin started a cleanse. He bought a cleansing kit. He took the cleansing pills and fiber for ten days. He refined his diet. For breakfast, he ate berries. For lunch, he ate salad. For dinner, he ate baked salmon and steamed broccoli. More importantly (for him at least), he did not drink his micro-brews, and he did not eat his favored hard pretzels.

Kevin felt light and optimistic. He also felt insatiably hungry. So he called me.

"I need to eat more food," he said.

"So eat more food," I said.

"Like what?"

"A sweet potato?"

"But that sounds good."

"So?"

"Shouldn't I be suffering?"

The Faces of Fasting: Kevin

Kevin's attitude is not unique. Most people, I believe, equate cleansing and fasting with suffering. We look at a cleanse as a Great Giving Up. We give up our favored foods and drinks, our preferred ways of eating. Why do we do perform this fanatical act? We think it will make us feel better.

"That's it," we say, "I'm never eating wheat again."

Then we wake up, have a bagel.

Sometimes, though, we just stop eating.

If you're like my friend Kevin, though, you go out and buy a cleansing kit. You give up carbohydrates. You give up bread, ice cream, red meat, beer--everything you love. You willfully suffer.

To many, this is a cleanse: Suffering. To many, a cleanse is penance. For eating too much. For drinking too much.

***

One might fast by eating nothing, or eating only one type of food, or simply eliminating a few foods from the diet. A fast can last several days to several weeks.

"Cleansing" is a relative term; it generally means the purging of excess toxins and residues--a view not supported by medical science. According to the alternative health community, cleansing can be achieved in many ways; a fast is one method of cleansing.

Others might include: enemas, cleansing kits, or extreme flushes.

Medical science and alternative medicine speak about cleansing and fasting in dramatically different terms. In fact, medical science believes "cleansing" is a misnomer, and has has all but denied its value. As Christopher Wanjeck writes on Live Science:

"Most doctors consider detox therapies to be pseudoscience, based on a misunderstanding of basic biology. Moreover, mainstream doctors view detox products as either a waste of money or potentially harmful."

Additionally, medical science has long debated the value of fasting, and although clear benefits have been observed in animals, the value of fasting, or calorie restriction (CR), for humans is still unclear.

In their review of the literature on calorie restriction, Leonie K Heilbronn and Eric Ravussin, writing in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, say:

"CR reduces metabolic rate and oxidative stress, improves insulin sensitivity, and alters neuroendocrine and sympathetic nervous system function in animals. Whether prolonged CR increases life span (or improves biomarkers of aging) in humans is unknown."

Although the value of CR is unclear, the new research on intermittent fasting is promising. As David Stipp notes in Scientific American, for example, intermittent fasting "revs up cellular defenses against molecular damage" and increases insulin sensitivity.

And last year, a study from Harvard revealed that "fasting can increase lifespan, slow aging and improve health by altering the activity of mitochondrial networks inside our cells" (Source).

Alternative health practitioners might urge you to expel mucoid plague. For medical science, though, the value of fasting is not detoxification, but cellular renewal and increased insulin sensitivity.

If anything, the two agree on one simple fact: the digestive system requires a great deal of energy. Depending on your view, then, you might believe that when not digesting food our body works to detoxify or, as Stipp, writes "rev up cellular defenses against molecular damage."

***

I started fasting at twenty-one, when home from Italy in June 1998, I discovered my father’s water-stained copy of Fit for Life, a book that theorized that eating fruit, in the morning, on an empty stomach, to the exclusion of other foods, inspires exuberant energy.

I call that summer “The Fruit Summer.” Each night, I feel asleep in faded Levis, and each morning, I leapt from bed, already dressed, primed for another day of fruit. Blueberries, cherries, and watermelon, and later peaches, plums, and nectarines: the evolving summer bounty.

With a few exceptions, I managed to avoid full-time employment until the age of twenty-eight. That summer, with little else to do, I devoted my life to “health.”

In my father’s basement, in flood-damaged cardboard boxes, I soon discovered other books: Back to Eden by Jethro Kloss, Arnold Ehret’s Muculess Diet Healing System, and Fresh Vegetable and Fruit Juices: What’s Missing in Your Body?

The latter, written by a fanatic’s fanatic, Dr. Norman Walker, a full-time juicer who lived to 107, claims that carrot juice is the most efficient food on the planet. Walker soberly explains the phenomena of orange skin, a symptom of dissolved waste passing through the epidermis. Like sweat. I underlined the following:

"In any case, is it not better to have a healthy satin-like skin, even though it may be slightly on the carrot shade, than to have the pasty complexion that publicizes the unhealthy condition of the body?"

Motivated by this sort of talk, and my new fruit-inspired energy, my fanaticism evolved. I pledged my body to juicing and cleansing. I did, in fact, develop a "healthy satin-like skin...slightly on the carrot shade."

Throughout my early twenties, I explored cleansing more deeply. I practiced food combining. For three years, I followed the illustrious Master Cleanse in the fall and spring, for ten days at a time. Fruit, especially, began to inhabit a special presence in my life. For each fruit, I had a story. I've recounted this time in my memoir:

"There was my first mango, shared one summer morning with Karen after a horrid fight. Later, whenever I ate mango, alone or shared, the grassy notes tasted of absence, her absence, which I could never bear, even when she left the room for a moment, so that I found myself, against my better judgement, blaming her for wanting to always leave.

Then there was the watermelon. It was a midsummer night, and I'd cut a ten pound watermelon in half. Standing on my father’s back stoop, wearing only Levis, I plunged my face into the red pulp and sucked—a Titan, I imagined, devouring a lycopene-rich planet.

Karen sat next to me, in perfect silence, reading for the first time my copy of Leaves of Grass. Twice she paused to look at me. Twice I lifted my head, and spit a seed at the sky. When she paused a third time, with a bold laugh, I was surprised to see tears in her eyes.

"Listen," she said, and she recited:

This day before dawn I ascended a hill and look’d at the crowded heaven,
And I said to my spirit,

When we become the enfolders of those orbs,
and the pleasure and knowledge of everything in them,
shall we be fill’d and satisfied then?
And my spirit said,
No, we but level that lift to pass and continue beyond.

My wife, Karen, on the final day of a 10-day fast in 2008

My good friend, Steve Pyle, a former champion wrestler who has practiced some form of fasting or cleansing for his entire life speaks about fasting quite eloquently on our food blog, FoodVibe.

So much of what he says rings true for me I'd like to quote his post, "On Cleansing and Fasting," in its entirety, but I'll limit myself to this:

"I find something so attractive in the idea of the cleanse. As if, through fasting, we can correct everything wrong with our bodies and ourselves. It’s the ultimate romantic notion—that by simply cleansing ourselves we can seemingly fix our past, or even repair the broken relationships in our lives.

The Internet is rife with websites devoted to fasting, cleansing and natural healing remedies. Some sites have shocking photos of mucoid plaque, gall stones, kidney stones, and other physical monstrosities expelled from peoples’ bodies during a cleanse. Page after page offers ecstatic testimony: "Fasting saved my life!" "Fasting cleared my acne!" "Fasting cured my cancer."

Many of these testimonies delve deeply into the idealism and mysticism of self-purification—that you can fast and cleanse yourself to a perfect body and soul.

While I do believe several of those testimonies, the idea of cleansing this way comes very close to the misguided idea that one can get something for 'nothing,' that one can reap maximum benefits from a minimum effort or sacrifice...

Yet isn’t that what repentance is all about? That we can somehow fix ourselves? That it can happen in a moment or quicker? Isn’t fasting a sort of atonement?

I think life is much harder. Life requires more work.

While fasting has many untold healing and spiritual benefits, there seems to be also a sort of delusion involved for the many dilettantes who swear by it. It can all get out of hand. Approached incorrectly, fasting can be dangerous. One can become carried away with the idea of self-righteousness and purification, to the point where you end up like the kid in Into The Wild. Tragic and pointless."

The Faces of Fasting: Steve

In his book Healing with Whole Foods, Paul Pritchford writes about the Eastern philosophy of yin-yang:

"Yin and yang, in essence, describe all phenomena. Some people may claim not to believe in yin-yang philosophy, yet these terms are merely descriptions of easily observed processes—day changing into night, youth into age, one season into the next:

Among its myriad possibilities, the philosophy of yin-yang is used in Eastern medicine to diagnosis and treat medical conditions; yet, even without specialized knowledge, a Westerner can apply the philosophy to his/her own health.

Essentially, yin-yang describes a duality, yet at that bottom of this duality, as Pritchford notes, is an unchanging source:

"Even though yin and yang specify change and separation, their source is permanent: 'The Great Ultimate is Unmoved,' according to Shao Yung, the 11th-century Chinese philosopher. The Bible expresses this idea in the phrase, 'I am the Lord; I do not change.' (Malachi: 3:6)"

This unchanging source can be likened to the human body: by nature, our body has a capacity for what Dr. Weil, in Spontaneous Healing, calls the "innate, intrinsic nature of the healing process."

Our health might manifest as "good" or "bad", but our bodies, at their very core, offer the possibility of unified, solid health: "The word healing," Dr. Weil notes, "means 'making whole'—that is, restoring integrity and balance."

In terms of cleansing, those words—integrity and balance—feel especially instructive to me. To the point: I often wonder whether my early cleansing contributed to my later illnesses. In any case, once ill, my fanaticism for cleansing and fasting transformed into something altogether destructive.

As I wrote last week:

"When I experienced my first symptoms of autoimmune illness, my obsession evolved, into what I now view as an eating disorder. My early symptoms were vague: moving pain, crushing fatigue, listlessness, depression. Blaming certain foods, I refined my diet. For months, I refused to touch anything but organic greens, sprouted grains, wild salmon, brown rice, and tempeh. I drank green drinks. I refused wine. I did not eat one ounce of cheese or bread. I avoided all night-shade vegetables. I never, ever combined proteins and carbohydrates at the same meal."

Blame. It seems ridiculous to blame food, but I believe this is the impulse behind so much of the fasting and cleansing practiced in America today. It is, at its root, extremism.

So why, exactly, do we fast? For that matter, why do we eat? Why do develop cravings for a certain thing? It isn't always food, this thing. Actually, it's never food. What is it then?

The Faces of Fasting: Emo Edition

I took the above "celf portrait" in the midst of my final fast, in the summer if 2006. And yet, even though I no longer practice fasting or cleansing, I still practice the sort of extreme penance I came to associate with the practice. Attempting to recover from a party, for example, I get on the treadmill and run until my heart nearly explodes.

But is running to exhaustion the cure for partying to exhaustion? Or is it, in a way, the same thing?

I believe fasting can be beneficial--if practiced in the right way, with the right spirit. My experience might be a cautionary tale. Steve's experience, though, offers a different view:

"Even as I write this, I've just finished my second cleansing fast, and am still thinking about it. I’m thinking what people who know have told me—that the most important part of any fast is what comes after. That is, how the fast has changed your perceptions about health and wellness to the point that it has permanently changed your habits.

Because your body exists in such a delicate stasis while on an extended fast, you really see how the things you put into your body affect your energy level, mental acuity, and spirituality. As a result, I have made some drastic lifestyle and wellness changes that I can see lasting for a long time, hopefully forever. So in that sense, the fast was a success.

But on a more important level, fasting has made me realize a few other things. First, I noticed how much time we spend preparing food, eating food, or thinking about what to eat next. The entire day opens up when you are not concerned with these things. This feeling is similar to the one I had when I swore off television—you realize how much time you have wasted. I experienced the same thing when I gave up smoking as well. Even with all of this new found time while fasting, it still seems that I spend most of it just sitting around, waiting for my water to filter.

There is a metaphor in there somewhere. Continuing on the subject of time, it is just exactly that which fasting has taught me the most—that time is indeed precious and scarce. Fasting forces us to think about how we fill the empty spaces, the silence. It all comes down to how we have used our time. That has been and always will be how we assess the success of life. There is no quick fix. You can't get something for nothing. It all comes down to how we fill the seconds, the moments, the hours. These are the things that ultimately make up all of our days. And we live them."

Trust Thy Gut: Healing in the Age of the Microbiome

2018-06-12T10:08:00.000-04:00

I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis in May, 2002. On the day of my diagnosis, I refused my doctor's prognosis, as well as the drugs, and commenced a journey to heal—a twelve-month experiment, absent any conventional medical guidance whatsoever, that ended midway through my honeymoon, when my new wife admitted me to the ER.

For twelve months, I devoted my life to an obsessive and fastidious investigation. Hunched over my desk, I spent day after day Googling. For a phrase like “ulcerative colitis natural cure,” I'd click twenty pages deep, reading every word on every site—every blog, every forum. Certain opportune comments led to new searches in new windows, fresh rounds of clicking.

When I risked leaving the house, I’d visit the book store, where I’d scan the indexes of books, seeking the slightest reference to "colitis," or "autoimmune." Inevitably, though, turning from my screen, or trudging from the store briefly lifted by some tidbit, I’d come to think of the only definitive cure: death.

I do not believe my obsessive investigation, nor my despair, were unique. In my experience, most people who experience illness--from colds to colitis--engage in some form of this fanaticism. And many, discovering confusing or contradictory advice, have yielded to despair. My search led to life.

I've learned to heal my symptoms--without drugs.

And yet, each year for many years, around March or April, just as the weather warms, I would suffer a relapse, or "flair." The severity of these flairs varied--yet I knew how to recover.

In May 2013, however, I suffered a particularly bad flair. My go-to remedies--a horridly wine-free lifestyle, VSL#3, and Metagenics--seemed to fail. Worse, the severity of the symptoms transported me back in time, to 2002, when I felt my despair most acutely.

My wife, who witnessed my behavior over the years, acclimated herself to my eccentricities. But even she was startled, that year, when I walked into our infant daughter's nursery, and pointed to the dirty diaper laying on the changing table.

"Save that," I said.

"What?" she asked.

"Save that," I said, and to state the case plainly, I added, with conviction, "I'm doing a fecal transplant enema."

Nearly all DNA in our bodies belongs to microorganisms: they outnumber our cells nine to one.

- Burkhard Bilger, writing in The New Yorker

Fecal Transplant Enemas: A Brief History

Although the provenance seems to be disputed--by this guy, for example--the fecal transplant enema is generally accepted (by the folks at Wikipedia, and elsewhere, at least) to have been first described in 1958, when the Chief of Surgery at Denver Hospital, Dr. Ben Eisman, reported in the Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology, on four patients who had been cured of pseudomembranous colitis (commonly known as C. difficile colitis or C. diff).

Eisman described a novel treatment: Enemas containing feces from healthy colons had been transplanted into the patient's colons, and had successfully replenished the patient's bacterial ecosystems, effectively curing the patients.

The next documented success occurred in the mid-1980s, when an Australian gastroenterologist, Dr. Thomas Borody, was faced with a particularly challenging case. A traveler, recently home from Fiji, had contracted an especially pernicious form of colitis. Searching the medical literature for a potential cure, Borody discovered Eisman's article, and decided to give it a try.

Writing in The Scientist, Cristina Luiggi explained Eisman's procedure quite candidly in her article "Same Poop, Different Gut":

"He collected stool from the woman's brother, and after screening it for known pathogens, he stuck it in a blender, added some brine, and filtered it to get rid of any undigested material. The stool, now turned into slush, was administered to the patient—who had her gastrointestinal tract previously flushed—via two enemas over the course of two days. The results were nothing short of surprising, Borody said. Within days her colitis was gone, never to return."

This is the method I'd considered in the spring of 2013. Obviously, like any reasonable human, I would've preferred to administer this treatment with a doctor.

Unfortunately, despite the mounting evidence of the treatment's success--including the first randomized control study--the FDA had made the procedure essentially untenable for any liability-minded doctor. Even though some doctors believed the regulations had become too strict., it was nearly impossible to find a reliable source of treatment.

(Happily, updated guidelines recommend the treatment for C. diff.)

Faced with this climate in 2013, but suffering acutely, I found myself standing in my daughter's room pointing at her diaper, envisioning my own guerrilla campaign.

All I'd need, I told my wife, was a "dedicated" blender and a little poop.

Michael Pollan's 2013 lead article for The New York Times Magazine, introduced the microbiome to many readers: "To the extent that we are bearers of genetic information, " Pollan wrote, "more than 99 percent of it is microbial. And it appears increasingly likely that this 'second genome'...exerts an influence on our health as great and possibly even greater than the genes we inherit from our parents."

Sterility, Cleanliness, & Purity

I believe the FDA's regulations mirror a cultural obsession with sterility--and as Kathleen Barnes, a Johns Hopkins Medical School researcher, said in a Science Talk podcast on the "hygiene hypotheses," this obsession may be harming our health:

"The hypothesis is that as we make the shift from dirt to sterile that you are changing the direction of your immune response. And so in the context of asthma, and frankly in other autoimmune diseases and diseases of inflammation, it's this imbalance from that side of our immune response that we believe evolved to protect us against things like bacteria and viruses and malarial parasites to the other side of our immune system that, frankly, when it's revved up causes diseases like allergies and some of these other diseases of inflammation."

For me, this obsession with sterility--and by way of sterility, cleanliness and purity--touches the most intimate part of my life: my relationship with food.

For my entire adult life, I’ve been a staunch "health-food" enthusiast. At the age of twenty-one, while traveling in Italy, I became a vegetarian. But even before my trip to Italy, I'd experienced a lifetime of brown rice and Moosewood Cookbook recipes, organic broccoli and honey-sweetened treats. My mother raised me with a special attention to my diet; she also sent me to a school--the Waldorf school--that favored whole food cooking.

I lost touch with this impulse throughout my teenage years. Then, when I was twenty, in college, in the midst a dismal semester eating in the student cafeteria, I came across a surprising image in the cafeteria kitchen: a box of hamburger patties stamped Grade F, But Edible.

Within a week, I was a vegetarian.

For me, vegetarianism, and later veganism, morphed in my twenties into obsession with purity. When I experienced my first symptoms of autoimmune illness, my obsession evolved into what I now view as an eating disorder.

My early symptoms were vague: moving pain, crushing fatigue, listlessness, depression. Blaming certain foods, I refined my diet. For months, I refused to touch anything but organic greens, sprouted grains, wild salmon, brown rice, and tempeh. I drank green drinks. I refused wine. I did not eat one ounce of cheese or bread. I avoided all night-shade vegetables. I never, ever combined proteins and carbohydrates at the same meal.

By the time I received my ulcerative colitis diagnosis my diet was already remarkably limited. The new diagnosis, however, thrust me into a new realm.

At the time, my relationship with food, ritualistic and minutely precise, alienated me from others. When eating lunch, specifically, I simply could not bear company. I dined under strict conditions: on the zero or five, at say, 12:00, 12:05 12:10, and so on, exactly four hours after my last bite of food—a bite I might’ve detained in my mouth, for minutes, if the time did not match my zero/five requirement. For fifteen months, from my ulcerative colitis diagnosis to my wedding day, I never once finished eating on the one, two, three, or four.

For reasons I have yet to entirely fathom, this rigor did not survive dusk. Dinner absolved me—and Karen, from her patient allegiance to my eccentricities. We’d invite others to share the weirdness—to share our chilled Chianti and buttery Castelvetrano olives, our pan-roasted wild salmon and spice-grilled mini sweet potatoes. Easing into these dinners, I eased back to myself—my pre-illness self: the gallant host, the ecstatic narrator.

Today I live for dinner’s absolution, but I am still haunted by my daytime exactitude. My timing is more fluid, but I can only bear company to a point—as long as I’m free to sit in complete silence, and slurp my 1¼ cup seasonal soup, and dip each of my twelve tempeh squares into a tiny ramekin of portioned extra virgin olive oil, and eat my seasonal salad without once glancing to my left or right, but down, to the latest New Yorker.

My Lunch: Every Single Day

My obsession with purity nearly killed me. Refining my diet to an impossible degree, I distorted my relationship with my body and food and those around me. Worse, I'd tricked myself into believing that this diet was the only diet for my symptoms.

Even then, I felt shameful of my illness; shameful of the person I'd become, this ill person with this horridly embarrassing disease. Yet I felt powerless to change. I could hardly utter the word, "colitis," in private, let alone write about it on a public forum.

In a sense, I was guilty of "kitsch," as Milan Kundera defines it:

"The absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence."

My recovery was occasioned by the opposite: an embrace of the chaotic and messy in my life and writing, the literal ingestion of dirt, and an entirely new diet typified by my first bite of meat after eight years of vegetarianism: a juicy, blood red hunk of lamb, cooked rare.

I'd ordered the lamb, spontaneously, with the sort of nervous enthusiasm a person might reserve for a wedding proposal. It was this enthusiasm, this new sense of goofy caprice, that also typified the attitude that inspired me to walk into my infant daughter's room seeking poop.

Not to say that I hadn't researched the topic with my typical compulsive energy. I had.

By "goofy caprice," I simply mean to say that in learning to recover from illness, I've opened myself to change, and that in doing so, I've also learned to see humor in my vehemence.

For me, humor provides confidence even in the darkest hours. This is something I try to express in my writing. I often write about illness, about how I feel as if I’ve been slapped by life. In part, I want to express an honesty about my feelings of woundedness. However, I don’t want this sense to drive my writing into dour seriousness, but rather give me range to be, at times, slightly goofy, as all celebration is.

In the end, after a series of tedious conversations with my wife, I did not administer a fecal transplant enema. I'll spare you the details. Instead, as a compromise, I tried the probiotic enema suggested on the website Listen to Your Gut.

This video, specifically, convinced me as well as the raw testimony of the video's star, Crohns Boy:

"So to tell you the truth it sucked being sick for the last 2 weeks especially while I was in Hawaii. When I look back at it now I am almost grateful for being sick as it has taught me a lot in the process. I have learned that when I feel awesome and other people are doing shitty I really have to remember how I felt when I was in their shoes-feeling depressed, hopeless, insecure etc and I have to be able to communicate effectively that they will overcome this and that stuff will be lost in the process. I also realized life has a great way of humbling you from time to time even if it came in the form of a flare lol I realize you really have to soak up the GOOD TIMES and enjoy them!! Sunshine is always awesome and appreciated the day after the storm.....simply said."

"Gut bacteria may be the key to preventing or treating some diseases," says The Harvard Medical School, which recommends fermented foods or probiotics as a healthy option for "good bacteria." [Photo Source]

Fermented Foods and Probiotics

I am a passionate proselytizer of bugs--specifically the beneficial bacteria found in fermented foods. In my former position at Whole Foods Market, I spoke to hundreds of people over ten years who offered testimony after testimony to the effectiveness of probiotics. And finally, it seems, the idea of "beneficial" bacteria has entered the cultural conversation under the meme of "the microbiome."

Although the microbiome is meant to describe our entire bodies’ bacterial ecosystem, much of the current talk focuses on the gut, and the profound influence the gut has on our health. Many scientists studying the microbiome are hesitant to make recommendations. In his groundbreaking article, however, Michael Pollan teased enough information out of his sources to discover “the outlines of a new diet.”

Near the end of the article, Pollan writes, “one of the keys to good health may turn out to involve managing our internal fermentation.”

How is this done? If you’re interested in trying a probiotic, I suggest inner-ēco™ Coconut Kefir--a food-based probiotic that follows Pollan’s advice of tending to “internal fermentation.” Another option is eating small amounts of fermented foods, like miso, tempeh, or pickled vegetables.

Recently, I have also tried a relatively new product, Restore. I cannot recommend this product enough. The effects have astonished me. My digestion has improved appreciably, and I am sleeping better. This is a simple addition to any diet.

Seven Years: Symptom Free

"I have learned that when I feel awesome and other people are doing shitty I really have to remember how I felt when I was in their shoes-feeling depressed, hopeless, insecure etc and I have to be able to communicate effectively that they will overcome this and that stuff will be lost in the process." - Crohns Boy

By the time I'd read this quote from "Crohns Boy," in mid-April, 2013, I'd already suffered two months of symptoms. I'd been to my doctor three times, and had, for the first time in my life, considered taking the potent anti-inflammatory drugs. I'd lost ten pounds, and had acquired the paperwork to take a LOA from work. Inspired by Crohn's Boy, I tried the probiotic enema on a memorable date, April 15, 2013: the day of the Boston Marathon Bombings.

That was Monday. By Wednesday, I was completely symptom-free.

I've remained symptom-free since then. (Update: As of August, 2018-five years later, I am still symptom-free).

I understand that the very nature of my illness might ensure a relapse--perhaps maybe even next spring. With each flare, and each recovery, however, I do believe I've learned to become a bit more human.

For me this means, specifically, an acceptance of that which I cannot control.

Each year, I learn to cede a bit more control to life as it is: radically imprecise, often downright messy. Bacteria, and by extension, probiotics and poop, have become metaphors for my growth.

That I can now talk about this so openly seems to prove the point--for me at least.