Western culture has pushed protein as a ticket to good and robust health, but we’ve gone overboard – to the detriment of both personal health and the wellbeing of the planet. Particularly egregious in this regard is beef, as every pound of protein from cattle consumes six times the resources in water and land than plant-based protein. I write about this in a HairLoss.com article, “Save a cow. Save the earth. Save yourself.,” and offer suggestions for eating fish (from sustainable stocks), legumes and reduced consumption of beef, pork and chicken within the context of a plant-centric meal.
There are all kinds of ways to eat sensibly, but satiety – that sense of fullness and satisfaction from a meal or snack – is an undeniable human instinct. Dr. Barbara Rolls, professor of nutrition at Penn State University and director of the Laboratory for the Study of Human Ingestion, has developed a way to approach this. She calls it Volumetrics, which is basically eating high-fiber, high-water content meals (think brothy vegetable soups) that create the same degree of satiety without the calories of a calorie-dense meal (marbled steak, potatoes and cheesecake, for example). I wrote about it here on HairLoss.com.
Maybe it’s not for you, and most of it is not for me, but there is a raw foods movement and some people are pretty serious about it. Most lean vegetarian, but some carnivores insist on eating uncooked meat as well (I don’t make this up). Here’s my article on the topic in RealJock.com – even if you can’t imagine not cooking your foods, this is an approach one can take, literally, by degree.
In the past 30 years we’ve seen the simultaneous rise of the health club culture and obesity in America. I’m not saying there is a causative relationship here. But it seems we’ve compartmentalized health and fitness even while stronger forces put it out of reach for many (100 million Americans are obese, according to latest statistics). This article written for HairLoss.com suggests bringing fitness and health into everyday living, the way things used to be. WARNING: It suggests doing your own housecleaning, and avoiding car use where possible. Countercultural, to be sure.
You see them at certain gyms: guys, usually, who wear special wrist bands to support that area of their arms and hands because, one assumes, they’re lifting very heavy weights with other muscles in the arms, shoulders, chest or back. This betrays a fitness imbalance, building one part of the body while only artificially supporting another part (weight belts fall in the same category). The balanced exerciser knows the whole body should work in concert, and that instead they need to develop hand, wrist and forearms strength by exercising those smaller muscles. I write about it here on HairLoss.com.
There is a dilemma faced by men and women where it comes to weight loss: your skin and overall appearance can be adversely affected by reducing body fat levels. Serious exercisers can suffer even greater epidermal injury if they use steroids, or when triathletes (like me) simply spend too much time in the sun. But there are natural, dietary means to offset these factors. Here’s my article on the subject posted on RealJock.com.
In a nutshell: Simply put, body fat can make the face look better, but it won’t help your six-pack. Is there anything you can do to stay buff in the body and pretty in the face? Indeed there is. The key is to avoid the extremes. Balanced exercise and nutrition can work together to optimize the health and appearance of both your body and your skin.
EZStreet Cold Asphalt is building an e-commerce site that examines the multi-billion dollar problem of crumbling highway infrastructure and what the Federal government, states and municipalities are going to do about aging roads. The good news is this client has a superior product that ultimately reduces costs for taxpayers as well as individual car drivers (fewer damaged vehicles due to rough pavement). We’re populating the site now with content that will make this a “go-to” site on the topic – including some articles that simply look at pothole humor. On a side note, I really enjoy working on this – it tackles a universally-experienced problem and is a great example of ingenuity and entrepreneurialism overcoming what some consider to be an intractable problem.