A few factors:

• Nutrient density: this is the amount of nutrients divided by the number of calories.  Basically, it will favor foods that are high in nutrients and low in calories.  Which is a big part of what provides our bodies with the building blocks to fight illness, build up the immune system, reduce risk of cancer, have healthy organs, and digest well.
• Glycemic index: basically a measure of how much impact the food will have on your blood glucose level.  It’s not healthy to have huge spikes in glucose, as it leads to weight gain, heart disease, high cholesterol, and possibly diabetes.  You can lower the glycemic index of a food by eating it with other things that have lower glycemic indexes.  I still don’t completely understand how this works… so forgive me if I got it a little wrong.
• pH: your stomach needs a certain level of acidity to properly digest food.  If your stomach has to work too hard to raise the pH, all kinds of discomforts ensue.  That’s why it’s good to add a little vinegar to your salad, or drink a glass of red wine with your meal.  Water also helps digestion move along smoothly.

What am I missing here?

My wacky alternative and unscientific view of the universe.

A point is 1 dimension.

A line, a collection of points, is 2 dimensions.

An atom, a collection of wavy lines, is 3 dimensions.

Time, somehow linked to a photon of light traveling through space, bouncing off atoms one unit of time at a time, is 4 dimensions.

A conscious mind, which collects light and atoms and gives them meaning, is 5 dimensions.

In a sense we are each collections of space and time, unique universes unto ourselves.

I’m not even high. This is what my brain comes up with when I go running after skipping it for a while.

And as I ran I saw each other person as particles of alternate universes bouncing along our separate paths.

The 6th dimension collects us.

I’ve decided to open Health Month up to a bit wider of an audience and to try to get 100-500 people who are willing to help test it for the month of September.

If you’re interested, you can now sign up here.

A couple stipulations:

1. The site’s not done yet.  So I’m really only looking for people who are okay with an unfinished product and don’t mind submitting feedback and bugs when things aren’t working quite right.
2. There are only a limited number of sponsorship chips (ways to play for free) that I’m going to give out this month.  Everyone who played last month also has 10 sponsorship chips, so if you know one of them that might make it easier.

I’m excited to see how this month goes.  Last month was a lot of fun, but I’ve added a bunch more rules that go beyond just healthy eating.  You can see a full list of them, along with some stats, here.

This is also the first month where we can begin to learn from our own behaviors.  I’ve been working on a stats page that gives you information about which kinds of rules work best for you.  Are you more responsive to DO rules or DON’T rules?  Are you more responsive to going cold turkey or whole hog, or are you better at finding a level of moderation?  Are you more responsive to rules that are easy or that you find to be difficult?  It’s just the beginning of a very interesting path, I think.  To be able to learn from our own behavior, and to use that information to help improve our behavior over time.

Anyway, if you want to see what I’ve been working on (coming up on day 70 of my 90 day challenge), this is it.

I’m looking for a list of nutrition hacks.  Things like combinations of food that hit all of the right protein, carb, and fat needs at once.  Foods that help absorb the good things in other foods, etc.  A couple examples:

• Brightly colored vegetables have cartenoids and flavenoids that help prevent cancer, heart trouble, strokes, etc.
• To absorb cartenoids in bright vegetables, eat with some oil.
• Above-ground portions of veggies have fiber, slow-release energy, and no fat.
• Whole grains, salt, lack of vitamin D all interfere with calcium absorption.
• Calcium needs magnesium to work right.

Et cetera.  I’m positive that there are a bunch more that we all know about briefly before forgetting about them again.  If anyone can point me to any other resources that talk about things like this, let me know!

One of the more existential realizations I remember having as a youth was that, in fact, nobody was in charge.  That everything was run by a bunch of monkeys, was how I dramatically phrased it at the time.  It’s a strange realization to have, especially when we are all trained to believe in the authority of parents, and teachers, and bosses. When we’re young it’s evolutionarily advantageous to give authority over to these figures–they can take care of us better than we can take care of ourselves.  Then, at some point, when we have gained the skills to either match or exceed the judgment and self-care abilities of these authority figures when it comes to our own lives, it becomes disadvantageous to continue relying on others for our own self-management.

But how do we let go of such a self-reinforced worldview?  As long as we rely on others to take care of ourselves, we continue to need others to take care of ourselves.  Hence the rocky adjustment period of college, give or take a decade or so depending on your personal circumstances.

The circumstances of the shift in worldview, however, have consequences of their own.  They may leave you feeling burned–distrustful of ever again placing any dependence on anyone.  Or, it may merely be a symbolic change that hides the fact that you’re still dependent on the care of others.

It might also leave certain areas of life woefully vulnerable.  We may be independent in spirit, but be terrible at managing our own money.  Or we may not have what it takes to keep a living space livable.  Or it might leave some social skills highly unrefined.  And we have two options: improve those skills, or continue to adjust our worldview to account for our weaknesses.  Maybe we don’t feel like learning how to keep a clean living space, and instead learn to take pride in it.  Or maybe we haven’t learned how to be in a relationship, and decide that we’re jaded and cynical about the state of coupling.

Being in charge of ourselves leaves us with a huge responsibility to come up with strategies to either fix, or cover up, weak spots.

It’s even easier to see when you think about this in others.  For example, our parents, teachers, and bosses.  The default authority figures.  They have the same challenges, after all.  And they excel at their “being-in-chargedness” to the extent that they are able to manage their weak spots without trying to cover them up or justify them with worldview shifts.

As soon as we can see these faults in others, we must turn on ourselves and examine how we ourselves are managing our weaknesses.  How are we doing at being in charge of ourselves?  How are we doing at being in charge of others (to the extent that we’re authority figures of our own right).

I think a lot of grief in social situations can be examined in this context.

• Is someone in charge of something that they don’t want to be in charge of?
• Is someone not in charge of something that they want to be in charge of?
• Is there confusion about who is in charge of something?
• Are you and others managing the weak spots of their in charge areas with competence?
• Is someone feeling under-appreciated for the effort required to be in charge of something?

I’ve been soaking up health-related information: nutritional, diet, recommended daily allowances, get thin quick schemes, etc for the last 45 days, and my head keeps spinning around in a circle around this question:

“What’s the best way to be healthy?”

Is it to count calories?  Is it to come up with some physical weight goal?  Is it to join a support group?  Is it to monitor protein, carbs, and fat?  Is it to seek a certain level of moderation?

It actually comes down to what works.  While some people lack information about how to be healthy, and all of us have gaps in our knowledge, it’s more about motivation and habit-creation than about simple information acquisition. Right?

That’s a little crazy though, isn’t it?  We live in a society that holds knowledge on a pedestal.  We figure that if we know the right thing to do, that we will do it.

Of course, brands and advertisers know this isn’t true, and have come up with a million and one gimmicks that are designed to “trick” you (or at least the uncontrollable urges part of your brain) into being healthy. We are in cahoots with them because we too want to trick ourselves.

Comparing different health strategies turns into a comparison of tricks rather than a comparison of information or health facts.  And choosing the right strategy is all about finding that strategy whose tricks work best.

Which, I guess, is just a realization that all of us knew already.  The part that I keep spinning on is whether or not the tricks can be simplified.  In the quest for tricks that are resilient to our subconscious’s ability to adapt and disable any but the most tricky of tricks, we create ever more complicated tricks. The trick-war with the subconscious, it seems, is probably futile.

What if we took the complexity out of tricks (so that the Catch-22 of needing enough motivation to, say, count calories hides the fact that you could have used that motivation to put any other health plan into motion) and went back to the core principles of health:

1. Eat healthy food
2. Exercise regularly
3. Repeat

The strategy doesn’t need to be complicated or tricky… we just need to figure out what motivates us.  What excites us, what gives us the energy to put will into action.  There are other ways to make something unboring, and there are other ways to bootstrap motivation.  There are other ways to trick the brain that have nothing to do with complicated and investment-requiring tasks (like counting calories) and instead tap into the things that we find intrinsically motivating and rewarding in the first place: support from friends, the feeling of making progress, recognition of hard work, etc.

I’m trying to wire it up that way, but the proof will be in the pudding (or some clever pun on that).

I’m about to pass the half-way mark in my 90-day challenge.  Over the last couple days, I let about 80 people in to the beta of Health Month, and today is the first day that we’re all supposed to be following our own self-imposed rules.  It’s always a little nerve-wracking to open something up to others, as they will inevitably start doing things that you never anticipated, and there are also a lot more edge cases to explore. Several bugs were definitely uncovered, but the thing that’s scariest is people telling you that your idea sucks… or, actually, even worse than that, not telling you anything (because it’s just boring).

Now I have 45 days to make it something that people would really like to use without me begging them. 

Since it’s called Health Month and it starts on the 1st of every month, I’m trying to get a few people in to help me test it out during August.  This gives me about 3 days to finish off the MUST HAVE features and to hopefully find a few people who are willing to not only test out a new idea, but to do it with an unfinished tool.

I made a list of features that still need to be done:

1. game manual / dictionary
2. Twitter/Facebook posting (and fruit)
3. Facebook liking of things
4. buying sponsorship chips
5. Amazon payments
6. design the daily emails
7. show everyone who’s playing during a given month
8. profile pages
9. track your meals
10. mobile version
11. import and display recent tweets from previous day to help you remember what you did
12. import local weather
13. get user’s location
14. post game report
15. sponsored invites
16. make healings and other events trigger notes on the game wall
17. more illustrations

Of those, I think mostly #1 (game manual) and #8 (profile pages) need to be done.  So that’s what I’m going to be working on these next 2 days.  I’ll be emailing people that signed up on healthmonth.com in 3 days hopefully.  If you’re particularly interested and capable of playing this game in August, say so in the comments (you can also re-submit the email address with additional notes if you want).

I mentioned this on Twitter the other day, but in case you missed it, I posted a short explanation of my project.  Here it is:

http://healthmonth.com

It’s been fun hearing a few reactions.  It’s all just words though… the real test will be the implementation, which is slowly but surely coming along.

The part of building websites that I dread, account management, sign in, log in, authentication, etc, has gotten a lot more interesting in the last few years.  Mostly because of all of the options for logging in via other site credentials.  OAuth, Open ID, Facebook Connect, etc.  I’ve done Open ID and Facebook Connect before, but this time around I thought that OAuth might be the best suited.  Because, even though being able to log in without creating a new account is pretty interesting, I’m more interested in getting data from the other sites than in just simplifying log in.  OAuth is good because it often gives you access to the APIs of these sites in addition to being a method of authentication.

It took me a while to wrap my head around the basics, but once I got it working for Twitter, Tumblr was no problem.  And even though Facebook has its own implementation of “OAuth 2.0″, that proved to be the most elegant implementation I’ve yet seen, and was actually a lot easier than the others.  I’m so glad I gave up on the Javascript API that Facebook offers.  It’s meant to make things simpler, but I think it’s actually a lot more fragile and complicated than the OAuth authentication options.

I also implemented Foursquare pretty easily.  And Google Contacts… but then I disabled it because I think that’s not quite the same as the rest.

Even though Flickr doesn’t use OAuth, they use something that works pretty similar, so even though I’ve had trouble getting their authentication system to work in the past, this time it was really no problem.  I think the whole series of steps of requesting a token, getting another token, and then verifying that token makes sense to me now.  Only took me about 5 years to click.

I am not just adding these sites for kicks.  There are actually a few things that I think can be improved in the whole “connect your sites up” world, which I’m excited to implement.  One thing, for example, that I don’t see many sites doing is allowing you to “auto-follow” people that you have added over time.  Or, at least, letting you know that another of your friends has joined the site since you imported Twitter or Facebook or whatever.

I’ve got another big part of the site to figure out today.  The game wall.  After you fill in your day’s work, the primary next step is to see stats and charts about your progress in the game and in the month, and the secondary step is to see how you are doing compared to others.  The secondary step is what I’m going to start working on today.

Good will is a valuable thing.

Somehow, in our brains, we know exactly how much good will we have towards any number of things.  Our wife, our baby, our job, people who walk slow, rain, people who are always late, people who drive you to the airport, people who hang out with you with no notice, our parents, our computer, AT&T, etc.

It would be interesting to investigate just how we are able to have completely different amounts of good will towards all of these things without it seeming contradictory to ourselves.  How is it possible to have so little good will for a long line at the post office while having so much good will for the person who saves our spot for us while we run to get a coffee?  It goes deep into our old brains’ sense of fairness, justice, manners, and what’s right and wrong.  An early feature of our cerebral cortex, most likely.

I’m now 4 weeks in to my 90 day challenge.  About 1/3rd of the way done.  Yikes.

Progress report.

1. I’ve fallen in love with heroku.com, and think that I’ll be using them to host the site once it launches.
2. My sleeping patterns are still a little out of wonk. Yesterday for example, I just couldn’t seem to shake that “I need a nap” feeling.  And combine that with some difficult problems I’m trying to solve and my brain sort of feels like a stale rubber band.  I think it’s more work-related than baby-related, strangely.
3. I’ve also fallen in love with highcharts.com when it comes to making pretty charts.  I might still use jqplots as well, but I think highcharts is actually quite a bit more powerful.
4. I’ve sort of solidified my idea pattern for now
   1. A game every month
   2. Minimal design, but colorful
   3. Not necessarily free
   4. Choose your own adventure beforehand
      1. Bet yourself, punish yourself
   5. Play with others
   6. Be sorted onto a semi-arbitrary “team” of people like you
   7. A day is 1 turn
   8. Minimal amount of “work” per turn
   9. Points awarded daily
   10. Points not entirely explained, or based on a semi-complex algorithm
   11. Pretty charts and stats as a reward for daily participation
   12. Semi-frivolous award system for good behavior
   13. Streaks are a central part of the game’s motivation
   14. Some sense of a “meta” game that spans months
5. I’d say I’m about 1/2 way done with the core functionality of the site.  Maybe a little more.  But there are always a lot of little things at the end that need to be figured out.  I’m looking forward to those too.
6. Sometimes I do have that fear, “what if this flops?”  Luckily it’s not an all-or-nothing kind of proposition.  But I’m still not sure that my basic premise is compelling enough to really make a splash.  One comfort is that the basic premise unlocks more premises that I can build on if the primary one isn’t enough by itself.
7. I’ve got to figure out a way to balance home life, work life, and health.  I’ve got a way to get about 4-5 hours of work in a day, which is pretty good if I can make it all productive work, but it has come at the cost of me doing any sort of exercise.  And I can feel my body sort of wasting away and creating pools of unused physical energy that then make me restless and feel gross.  I’m going to go on a run today, instead of working.  It is the weekend after all.

I’m building this health site kinda thing. It’s funny because I’ve somehow become interested in the world of health and fitness. When we started 43 Things, I would often answer the question, “where do you work” with something along the lines of “at a self-help internet company”. I liked that answer because it got to the heart of what our goals were, while also sort of taking the asker off guard. Because being involved in the self-help market is sort of like saying “I’m a Scientologist.”

Health and fitness, dieting, and that whole market is not quite as sketchy as the self-help market, but I think it’s definitely related. There are about 3.8 billion diet plans, ways to lose weight fast, ways to be healthy without actually being healthy, etc. There are a few nice and simple health and diet plans out there, like the Hacker’s Diet and the Primal Blueprint, but even they sort of alienate a lot of their audience by trying to appeal too much to a certain smaller audience. Which, I guess I wouldn’t notice as much if I was actually in their target audience.  And, most likely, anything I create will be yet another small audience kind of deal, but as far as I know there isn’t one for people like me, people who are sort of into Nike+ and sometimes into weird fasting diets and sometimes into extreme rule-making for short periods of time and sometimes into giving up something for Lent, but really pretty unmotivated to go much beyond that.  Even though I do intellectually know that health is a fairly important thing.

What motivates me?  Competitions, social connections, challenges, easy things, pretty things, simple things, cheap things, things without a ton of ads, things that are easy to understand, things that don’t make me shiver with sketchiness, things that work with technology, things that my friends like, things that don’t seem like a scam, things that have some scientific and common-sense backing.

When it comes down to it, health is easy.  Michael Pollan’s Food Rules sum it up, mostly.  They really aren’t rules as much as anecdotes about food.  Eat real food, exercise, don’t get too stressed out.

The problem, of course, isn’t knowing the rules, it’s following them.  It’s motivation.  And that’s where I think I can help, because the Internet, and social games, provide nothing if not a ton of motivation to do things.  Most of the time, we’re motivated to do things that have no bearing on our health, or that harm it.  But what if you applied the same addicting methods that make us check our Twitter and Facebook feeds 982 times a day to eating real food, exercising, and not getting stressed out?

Anyway, that’s what my brain sounds like lately.

I’ve now got the basic structure of the health game figured out.  And the rules.  And the signup page.  And the part where you make bets and promises with yourself.  And the part where you can sponsor people.  And the part where you can learn something about yourself based on the kind of rules you chose and how difficult you think they are and how important you think they are.  And there are spirit animals involved that help you along the way, well 3 spirit animals and one sort of anti-spirit animal sort of modeled after Steven Pressfield’s Resistance.  The Lizard Brain.  And there are wild cards, and ways to track your progress, and share your progress, and now I just need to get working on the Encyclopedia.  After that, I’ve got to work on the actual game itself.  How you play it once the game starts.  That’s going to be a big chunk of my remaining work and I’m excited about it.

I think I’ve got some good momentum now.

I’m really excited about it.

I’m just gonna keep working on it.

I think I’m getting my head wrapped around Illustrator. The concepts, at least, if not exactly the skill.

I’ve been starting to practice copying icons (this one’s taken from 750words.com, it’s the badge you get for writing your 750 words pretty quickly many days in a row):

The left side is my vector-made version, and the right side is of course the blown up original.

Here’s how mine looks in Illustrator’s pixel preview:

Not quite as good, but not too bad, right?

I got a small Wacom tablet on loan from a friend, too. Though, I think it needs some calibration because it’s all loosey-goosey with its lines right now. In any case, I’m super stoked and motivated to make a few of my own illustrations and icons for this new site I’m planning.

For anyone who is interested, I’m reading the Adobe “Adobe Illustrator CS4: Classroom in a Book” and watching all the tutorial videos on this page.

In the meantime, I’m officially out of the starting gates on the development of my website.

Here’s what I’ve been working on the last couple days:

• Made a few more changes to the data model, added a bit more of a wild card element to the “game”.
• Am reading “A Theory of Fun”.  Loving the amateurish drawings that go along with the writing.  Sometimes unpolished is full of charm.  This book was recommended to me by 3 out of the 4 people who responded to my original question about game-design books.  So far, it’s living up to the hype.
• Found a few ways to super-simplify the idea.
• I am prototyping the interaction and design for what will be the first major action on the site after signing up.  I think this is the heart of the site, and I think it’s good to start at the heart.
• Realized my mantra: seek out complicated, ugly, tedious, and useful parts of the world and make them simple, pretty, and fun.
• Have been drawing lots of pictures and going on lots of walks.

Tomorrow is the end of week 1, and I was hoping to have a bit more done by then, but I’ve been exhausted the last couple days (I think 5 weeks of wacky sleep patterns is finally catching up to me).  I got a lot of good sleep last night and am still exhausted today.  I’m hoping that my body either adapts or more sleep eventually fixes the problem.  Can’t really think creatively and embark on huge tasks of design without a fully rested mind.

After I decided to sit down and figure out how to draw in Illustrator, I think it’s going to be easier than I thought.  I stayed up a little late and watched a bunch of tutorial videos on adobe.com, and think I can wrap my head around handles and anchors.  In fact, I think it’ll probably be easier to draw in Illustrator than to draw on paper and scan it in.  At least for the level of complexity that I’m interested in being able to do (not much).

I’m excited about that.  New skill!

When I woke up this morning (well one of the times, since there are now about 3-4 separate wakings up to have new ideas from) I started thinking more about the multidisciplinary nature of entrepreneurship, especially when you’re a 1-person company and want to do as much of it yourself.  Of course, I realize that this is sort of a “bad idea” amongst some entrepreneurial thinking.  Almost all VCs and other entrepreneurs recommend having a 2-person team, at least.  Personally, I think that that applies mostly when your “idea person” is not technical, or isn’t technical enough.  My strength has always been the ability to be creative and technical at the same time.  My weaknesses have always been design, completing that last 10% of polish, promoting completed products, and scaling successful ideas.  I’ve made a pretty conscious decision to try harder at the last 10% of polish by having smaller projects, promoting projects (this blog is one attempt at that) in the last year or so.  And scaling, has mostly been taken care of by the improvements in cloud computing hosting services.  That just leaves design.  And I’m on it!  I also have found a couple great designers that I like working with… I just feel bad asking them to work for little pay, as it’s always at the beginning of a project that I most need their help and have the least resources to compensate with.

Here’s a quick list I put together of skills, and the types of people that are generally expected to have those skills.  Some of them are “nice to haves” but all of them (I think) can play a crucial role in the success or failure of the project if they are absent.

What’s missing from this list? Everyone has these skills to a certain extent, but many of them must not only be trained over time, but also simply embraced as skills worth having. So often I hear ideas from people who are almost proud of having no technical ability. Is drafting technical people a fun pasttime? Why not just spend a week or two with a book and a good technical friend willing to answer questions and knock that skill out? It really doesn’t take much more than that. I’ve come to believe that skills are mostly personality decisions. We often decide to write off certain skills as a way of defining ourselves.

Learn a new skill. It will save your project a lot of time and money in the long run. Life is long.