Drop Dead Healthy A. Jacobs (good novels to read .TXT) 📖

body parts. What about the spleen? And the liver? And the esophagus? I haven’t devoted a month to any of those.

But in the name of mental health, I have to put an end to full-time, nonstop healthy living. I promised my sons. They’ve been waiting patiently for two years to share cupcakes with me during birthday parties.

Am I the healthiest man alive? I’m certainly a lot healthier than I was two years ago. I went for my final exam at EHE and found out I’d lost another half pound, ending at 156.5 (total weight loss: 16 pounds). I’d gone down two belt sizes. Dr. Harry Fisch told me that my lipid panel numbers “are so good, they’ll give you a heart attack” (HDL: 48, LDL: 62). I more than halved my body fat percentage. I can now run a mile in less than seven minutes as opposed to not at all. I have a visible chest.

I’ve hopefully boosted my longevity, despite my stubborn refusal to move to Okinawa or Sardinia. I’ll let you know in a few decades.

But the healthiest in the world? Who knows. Probably not. For one thing, I’ve been so busy with food and exercise, my life has teetered out of balance. I’ve skipped movie nights with my wife and missed pre-K presentations.

Dr. Bratman would say I’ve contracted a bit of orthorexia. Lately, I’ve been avoiding most fruits, except the bitterest one, grapefruit, afraid they are too highly glycemic.

So that’s it: My days of full-throttle healthy living are over. Instead, I’ll be switching to a healthier approach to health.

I’ll incorporate much of what I learned.

I’ll chew more. I’ll walk more, and hum and pet dogs. I’ll wear my noise-canceling earphones. I’ll stop to smell the almonds. I’ll write e-mails on my treadmill and run my errands. I’ll reframe life’s horrible situations and outsource my worries.

I’ll floss my teeth and breathe from my stomach. I’ll eat my Swiss chard and quinoa. I’ll drink ice water, meditate, and give abundant thanks.

I’ll try to stay married and have not-too-infrequent sex. When I exercise, I’ll do High-Intensity Interval Training, alternating between sprinting and walking every minute. I’ll avoid blue light before bedtime.

I’ll follow fitness expert Oscar Wilde’s advice: Be moderate in all things, including moderation. There’s room for immoderation. Celebratory feasts can be healthy, and the occasional triathlon as well.

And I will try to have more days like June 19, the final day of my project, when Julie and I schlep the boys to Brooklyn to see a minor league baseball game featuring our local team, the Cyclones. I’ve walked 8,304 steps so far, many of them to get to the stadium. I’m in the open air, breathing in those phytoncides. I’m getting just a little sun exposure for my vitamin D. I’m watching baseball, which may lower blood pressure.

I’ve done some aerobic activity, including tossing a ball in a booth near the stadium. A radar gun tells you how fast you pitched.

The whole family tried it out. The radar malfunctioned when Zane lobbed his ball, and registered that he threw at ninety-four miles per hour. “Get that kid a contract with the Mets!” said the guy running the booth.

And right now I’m walking back to our seats, holding the little hand of my pitching prodigy, his touch suppressing my level of the stress hormone cortisol. Zane’s hand is sticky, since he’s currently at work on his one permitted treat for the day, a stick of blue cotton candy.

“Do you want a taste, Daddy?” he asks. He holds it aloft for me to see, a bright Q-tip of spun sugar.

I hesitate. Yes. I guess I do. Just a taste.

Epilogue

ON A FRIDAY AFTERNOON IN September, a few months after my project ended, I was strolling on my treadmill desk, finishing final revisions on my book, when my father called my cell phone. My aunt Marti had fainted.

I wasn’t too concerned, and neither was Marti. She probably had an excess of Brazil nuts in her diet and not enough hemp seeds. Or vice versa. In no time, she’d be up and about and railing against factory farms or horizontal hydrofracking, as always.

On the insistence of her holistic doctor, Marti reluctantly went to see a regular old western-style, test-giving, pharmaceutical-prescribing doctor.

Two days later the results came back. I was wrong. It wasn’t a lack of hemp seeds. It was cancer. Acute myeloid leukemia, a particularly nasty bully of a cancer that causes the bone marrow to pump out so many white blood cells that they choke the system.

Marti didn’t believe in God. If anything, she believed in a vague, benevolent Earth Mother–type goddess. But it was clear that whatever divine or nondivine force driving these events had a particularly cruel sense of irony.

This is Marti—eater of kale, avoider of toxins, disparager of microwaves and cell phones, a woman who ate organic food and slept on organic bedsheets. And she is the one who ends up with cancer?

Though disinclined, she agreed to a short course of chemo at Cornell Medical Center in New York at the family’s urging. She called it “warfare medicine.” She was so committed to her peaceful worldview, she hated the metaphor of “battling cancer.” The chemo didn’t work. She’d need another round.

I visited her. She looked surprisingly good—thinner, yes, but still with all her hair, still wearing her purple scarf. And her mood was oddly buoyant. We talked about Tina Fey’s book and Andrea Bocelli. She told me about her friend who illustrated the children’s classic Walter the Farting Dog, whom she thought my kids might want to meet. During one visit, we walked to Central Park and lay on the grass—a practice she called “earthing.”

We traded e-mails every day about nothing of great consequence. My son wanted to know her favorite animal, and she replied “elephant, since they are matriarchal, mourn the loss of their own kind, and are vegetarian.” She scolded me for wearing my sunglasses all day long when my glasses were broken (it’d throw off my