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.