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!

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).