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

yourself (you can try HourFace.com). Keep it in your wallet so that your remember to eat for your future self.

6. Consume an apple, a bowl of soup with cayenne pepper, two glasses of water, and a handful of nuts. They have all been shown to suppress the appetite. Some more details below, starting with the one I found most effective, and ending with the one I found least effective.

• Apple: A Penn State study showed that those who ate an apple fifteen minutes before lunch consumed 187 fewer calories than those who had applesauce.

• Nuts: Or beans. Or pretty much any protein makes you feel full longer than carbs. Which is why I force eggs on my kids in the morning.

• Water: A Virginia Tech study found that drinking two eight-ounce glasses of water before a meal helped obese people lose weight.

• Cayenne pepper: Spicy foods might help us lose weight, partly by curbing our urge for sugary, salty, and fatty foods. A Perdue University study showed cayenne pepper lowered appetite.

• Soup: Another Penn State study recommended a small bowl of clear soup, such as bouillon, before the meal. The soup eaters consumed 134 fewer calories.

Appendix C

Five Tips on Treadmill Desks

by Joe Stirt, M.D., anesthesiologist, blogger, and treadmill-desk pioneer

1. Any working treadmill will do to get started—don’t use cost as an excuse. Go to Craigslist and find one for a hundred dollars or less. Sometimes people will give you theirs free if you ask, just to get rid of it. Make sure you turn it on and walk on it before you pay for it. If it can handle 2 mph without sparking or smoking, you’re money.

2. Don’t be fooled by websites advertising treadmill desks for hundreds or thousands of dollars. You have most of what you need in your home and shouldn’t spend more than a hundred dollars (apart from the treadmill) to get a working setup that you can tweak and modify as you go along.

3. The basic setup requires only a stack of crates, boxes, or furniture in front of your treadmill stable enough to support a computer screen and/or TV. Make the stack tall enough that the center of the screen is around eye level as you walk on the treadmill. If you’re forced to look down all the time, your neck and eyes will get tired and you’ll quit.

4. Now you’ll want to lay a board across the treadmill handles for your keyboard. Use books atop the board to elevate the keyboard to where it’s comfortable to type on. The mouse or track pad goes on either side of the keyboard.

5. Start at 0.7 mph. Yes, it’s absurdly slow. But you need to get used to a whole new way of working. Gradually increase your time on the treadmill, and increase your speed in 0.1 mph increments weekly to where you can work comfortably. I’ve been at 2.0 mph for years now, averaging three hours a day.

Within one to two weeks you will start really liking your treadmill work space and likely realize you are feeling better and doing better work than when you were a desk slug. It only gets better. Not to mention that you’ll sleep better and lose weight if you stay with it. If you want more specialized tips or advice, e-mail me: bookofjoe@gmail.com.

Appendix D

My Five Foolproof (for Me, at Least) Methods of Stress Reduction

1. Self-massage. The G-rated kind. I rub my shoulders, neck, and arms daily.

2. Outsource your worry. Find someone to trade worries with you. Or you can try GetFriday.com, an outsourcing firm that will do almost anything legal.

3. Meditate. My trick: I focus on the gently pulsating light on a MacBook in sleep mode, and try to breathe in sync with it. I’m sure Buddhist monks do the same.

4. Get a dog or cat. A State University of New York–Buffalo study found that having pets present lowered stress during stressful tasks such as doing hard math problems or submerging the hand in ice water. Thankfully, my family and I are the occasional foster parents to Daisy, a very cute and drooly basset hound owned by our friends Candice and Ben.

5. Put the serenity prayer to work. I’ve long known the prayer (God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change/Courage to change the things I can/And wisdom to know the difference). But this year, at the suggestion of several stress books, I wrote down all of my worries, and sorted them into Category A (things I can control) and Category B (things out of my control). My Category-B list was an astoundingly long one, ranging from fear of the super-volcano hiding underneath the surface of Wyoming, which may explode any day now and plunge planet Earth into an era of darkness, to the worry that my sons won’t find their soul mates, to the concern that the super-volcano might kill my sons’ soul mates.

Appendix E

The Ten Best Pieces of Food Advice I’ve Gotten All Year

“Just eat a goddamn vegetable.”

—The Onion newspaper

In an enlightening 2011 article, The Onion quoted an FDA spokesman who said, “Just buy a bag of f*cking carrots and eat them the way you’d normally eat a hot dog. You stand in front of a cold fridge stuffing the hot dogs in your fat face, just do that with a carrot. It’s that simple.” Well said.

“Don’t eat white stuff unless you want to get fatter.”

—Timothy Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Body

I’m not opposed to all carbs, but white bread, white pasta, white tortillas? Ban them from your plate. And arguably potatoes as well. Ferriss—as well as more traditional experts like Walter Willett, chairman of Harvard’s Department of Nutrition—says to avoid potatoes. “The venerable baked potato increases blood sugar and insulin levels nearly as fast and as high as pure table sugar,” Willett writes in his book Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy.

“Make it crunchy.”

—Paul McGlothin, coauthor of The CR Way

The junk food industry spends millions