How to Stop Putting Off Important Things

We all do it. Between work and family obligations, errands, the mere whiff of a social life and the few minutes we manage to cobble together here and there for relaxation, we carry around an endless source of excuses for why something important to us must wait until later. But later rarely comes knocking and before we know it, the stress associated with not taking action has become yet another excuse to procrastinate.

procrastination

Take this blog, for example. It has been about a year since I published a new post. I say “published” because for the first few weeks, I was writing, but putting off publishing my work. This post wasn’t ready yet. That one needed more polishing. Continue reading

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More is Less

Minimalism, as a lifestyle concept, is something I have only recently begun to appreciate. I had heard the term before, but associated it more with an austere artistic style than simple living; like a black, 12-inch cube almost imperceptibly off center in a 10-by-10-foot white square. Art!

And even before I was drawn into the minimalist blogosphere (an attraction that was probably fated by the alignment of my evolving philosophies with the stories and tips offered up by bloggers like Leo Babauta (Zen Habits) and Joshua Becker (Becoming Minimalist)), my wife was ‘minimalizing’ our lives to great effect.

A garage sale here, a clothing donation there, the occasional ‘junk’ purge. Continue reading

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Should We Believe Anything We Read?

There ought to be an addendum to the old adage, “Don’t believe everything you read.” When reading mainstream media coverage of scientific studies, change “everything” to “anything.”

Case in point: ‘Cholesterol levels linked to early signs of Alzheimer’s in brain’, an article recently published by an NBC senior health reporter, heralds a new study that found a correlation between certain cholesterol levels and evidence of certain proteins in the brain, which are known to help form the plaques found in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients.

While these findings may serve as the foundation for future inquiries into the possible causes of one of our most prolific killers, this is not how the NBC reporter chose to introduce her busy readers to the story (to be fair, “potential foundation for future inquiry found” does not make for a very splashy lede). Rather than honing her words to convey the subject of her report accurately, she led with the most common mistake a science reporter can make Continue reading

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So, Brian, what do you eat?

I’ve lost 28 pounds in the past 6 months while eating as much as I want and with almost no exercise. Friends and colleagues that notice my leaner physique often ask me how I did it. When I explain that the biggest factor is diet and that the most significant change is the elimination (or at least limitation) of grains, “white” starches, added sugars and other processed foods, the inevitable follow-up is, “so, like the Atkins diet?”

“Well, kind of,” I say. “It’s not unlike Atkins. But there are important differences.”

This post is the first in what will likely be a series. Here, I will answer the most common question I get from friends and family who are curious about my diet and/or interested in experimenting with this way of eating — “What exactly do you eat?” In future posts, I will reveal how I arrived at my diet and why I believe it is so critical that the scientific information supporting it be spread as quickly as possible to as many people as possible (hint: it’s a matter of life and death).  Continue reading

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