A. J. Jacobs
The key to making healthy decisions is to respect your future self. Honor him or her. Treat him or her like you would treat a friend or a loved one. A Stanford study showed that those who saw a photo of their future self made smarter financial decisions.Collection: Future
My goal? To test out every diet and exercise regimen on planet earth and figure out which work best. I sweated, I cooked, I learned to pole dance. In the end, I lost weight, lowered my cholesterol and doubled my energy level. I feel better than I ever have.Collection: Diet
I tried the paleo diet, which is the caveman diet - lots of meat. And I tried the calorie restriction diet: The idea is that if you eat very, very little - if you're on the verge of starvation, you will live a very long time, whether or not you want to, of course.Collection: Diet
I have little shame, no dignity - all in the name of a better cause.
I was what they call 'skinny fat' - a body that resembled a python after swallowing a goat.
The best we can do, to paraphrase Pollan, is to eat whole foods, mostly plants, and not too much.
There's a very passionate pro-chewing movement on the Internet called Chewdiasm. They say that we should be chewing 50 to 100 times per mouthful, which is insane. I tried that. It takes like a day and a half to eat a sandwich. But their basic idea is right. If you chew, you'll eat slower and you will get more nutrients.
I was very good at sitting. But I just read so much research about how horrible sitting is for you. It's like, it's really bad. It's like Paula-Deen-glazed-bacon-doughnut bad. So I now move around as much as possible.
It's sort of my job to feel good.
I pledged to become the world's greatest expert in a field I knew nothing about.
Unconditional love is an illogical notion, but such a great and powerful one.Collection: Christian
I've started to look at life differently. When you're thanking God for every little you - every meal, every time you wake up, every time you take a sip of water - you can't help but be more thankful for life itself, for the unlikely and miraculous fact that you exist at all.Collection: Water
I'm addicted to self-improvement. The thing is, there's so damn much about myself to improve.Collection: Self
I've never before been so aware of the thousands of little good things, the thousands of things that go right every day.Collection: Littles
If my former self and my current self met for coffee, they'd get along OK, but they'd both probably walk out of the Starbucks shaking their heads and saying to themselves, “That guy is kinda delusional.”Collection: Coffee
I am officially Jewish, but I’m Jewish in the same way the Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant.Collection: Italian
The key to making healthy decisions is to respect your future self. Honor him or her. Treat him or her like you would treat a friend or a loved one.Collection: Keys
The year showed me beyond a doubt that everyone practices cafeteria religion... But the important lesson was this: there's nothing wrong with choosing. Cafeterias aren't bad per se... the key is in choosing the right dishes. You need to pick the nurturing ones (compassion), the healthy ones (love thy neighbor), not the bitter ones.Collection: Compassion
My reading list grows exponentially. Every time I read a book, it'll mention three other books I feel I have to read. It's like a particularly relentless series of pop-up ads.Collection: Book
Scrabble - The game is available in Braille. That’s a nice fact. This makes me feel better about humanity for some reason. I can’t really explain why.Collection: Nice
Think of negative speech as verbal pollution. And that's what I've been doing: visualizing insults and gossip as a dark cloud, maybe one with some sulfur dioxide. Once you've belched it out, you can't take it back. As grandma said, if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. The interesting this is, the less often I vocalize my negative thoughts, the fewer negative thoughts I cook up in the first place.Collection: Nice
After decimating several vegetables, I decide juicing is my favorite form of food preparation. There's something perversely appealing about subjecting an innocent plant to that much violence.Collection: Vegetables
Probably 90 percent of our life decisions are powered by the twin engines of inertia and laziness.Collection: Decision
A few weeks later, I’m in a fluorescent-lit classroom in Chelsea awaiting the start of the official Mensa test. I’m sitting next to a guy who’s doing a series of elaborate neck stretches, like we’re about to engage in a vigorous rugby match. He’s neatly laid out four types of gum on his Formica desk: Juicy Fruit, Wrigley Spearmint, Big Red, and Eclipse. I hate this guy. I hope to God he’s not a genius.Collection: Hate
I'm still agnostic. But in the words of Elton Richards, I'm now a reverant agnostic. Which isn't an oxymoron, I swear. I now believe that whether or not there's a God, there is such a thing as sacredness. Life is sacred. The Sabbath can be a sacred day. Prayer can be a sacred ritual. There is something transcendent, beyond the everyday. It's possible that humans created this sacredness ourselves, but that doesn't take away from its power or importance.Collection: Prayer
This is what the Sabbath should feel like. A pause. Not just a minor pause, but a major pause. Not just lowering the volume, but a muting. As the famous rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel put it, the Sabbath is a sanctuary in time.Collection: Sanctuary
Very few people changed the world by sitting on their couch.Collection: People
Med students panic their first year when they learn all the diseases. It's not until the second year that they learn the cures.Collection: Health
There's a beauty to forgiveness, especially forgiveness that goes beyond rationality. Unconditional love is an illogical notion, but such a great & powerful oneCollection: Powerful
Behavior shapes emotions.Collection: Shapes
I always thought the name of Utah’s major newspaper was some sort of weird misspelling of the word “desert.” But no, Deseret is the “land of the honeybee,” according to the Book of Mormon. I guess I should have figured they would have caught a typo in the masthead after 154 years.Collection: Book
The Bible improved my ethical IQ. I started to act like a good person. I tried not to gossip, and lie, and covet, and just by pretending I was a good person, I think I actually became a little bit better of a person. I'm not Gandhi or Angelina Jolie, but it was a baby step.Collection: Baby
Plus, in one of his e-mails, the guy said he didn't like pancakes. What kind of asshole doesn't like pancakes?Collection: Guy
My immune system has always been overly welcoming of germs. It's far too polite, the biological equivalent of a southern hostess inviting y'all nice microbes to stay awhile and have some artichoke dip.Collection: Nice
It comes back to the old question: How can the Bible be so wise in some places and so barbaric in others? And why should we put any faith in a book that includes such brutality?Collection: Wise
The Bible talks a lot about thankfulness, and I'm more thankful than I ever was. I try to concentrate on the hundreds of things that go right in a day, instead of the three or four that go wrong.Collection: Thankfulness
The World Health Organization ... estimated that 1.6 million years of healthy living are lost every year in Europe because of noise pollution.Collection: Years
A 2002 Oxford study showed counting sheep actually delays the onset of sleep. It's just too dull to stop us from worrying about jobs and spouses.Collection: Jobs
Let me tell you, though: being the smartest boy in the world wasn’t easy. I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t want this. On the contrary, it was a huge burden. First, there was the task of keeping my brain perfectly protected. My cerebral cortex was a national treasure, a masterpiece of the Sistine Chapel of brains. This was not something that could be treated frivolously. If I could have locked it in a safe, I would have. Instead, I became obsessed with brain damage.Collection: Boys
It's hard to be in a bad mood when you're walking around looking like you're about to play the semifinals at Wimbledon.Collection: Play
How do you gag the voice in your head that says, 'You don't have to [do it] today. There's always tomorrow.'?Collection: Procrastination
I found there were things about religion that I really loved; things like the sense of gratefulness that it brings.Collection: Gratefulness
I know that you should always say yes to adventures or you'll lead a very dull life.Collection: Adventure
Taking the Bible too literally is a mistake. It should be read as a guidebook of wisdom and insight.Collection: Mistake
I love to live things, so I wanted to immerse myself and get into the mindset - and sandals - of my forefathers.Collection: Mindset
Behavior shapes beliefs.Collection: Shapes
I thought religion would make me live with my head in the clouds, but as often as not, it grounds me in this world.Collection: Clouds
I grew up in a very secular home with no religion at all, so I was starting from zero.Collection: Zero
Giulia Melucci has written a wonderfully funny and moving book. It's like Eat, Pray, Love, with recipes.Collection: Moving
I’d recommend learning to accept rejection. Become friends with rejection. Be nice to rejection, because it’s a huge part of being a writer, no matter where you are in your career.Collection: Nice