Drop Dead Healthy

by A. J. Jacobs

  When the article came out, the gossip blogs claimed she had declared a feud with Madonna. Madonna’s fans flooded her with vitriolic e-mails. So what did she do? She denied saying it and tweeted that the reporter (me) was just trying to cause trouble. I started getting calls from Entertainment Tonight about the feud and my part in it.

  I was furious. “I can’t believe she claims that I made it up!” I told Julie. “I have it on tape. Why would I make that up? Why would I want to?”

  “Why do you care? It’s ridiculous. It’ll go away in a day.”

  “No. You don’t understand. The Internet is forever. It’ll never go away.”

  She besmirched my reputation, such as it is.

  I went back to my office and looked at my smiling-skull painting. It relaxed me a little. But not totally. Because the Internet isn’t the only thing that threatens to go on forever.

  As I mentioned, I’m obsessed with these books on immortality. It’s coming soon, possibly in our lifetime, say some scientists. The latest estimate, according to a Time magazine cover story, is 2045. Gene therapy will keep my precious telomeres long and sturdy. Sirtuin will keep my muscles fresh. And Sofia’s accusation will follow me around for thousands of years, like an eternal National Sex Offenders Registry.

  Mortality is scary, but there’s a comforting element as well, since you know there’s a limit. Immortality comes with its own set of complications.

  Time Management

  One of the most stressful parts of my life is the lack of time in my day. Staying healthy is pretty much a full-time job. Consider this partial list of what I have to do every day:

  stretching (10 minutes)

  meditating (10 minutes)

  chewing (10 minutes)

  saying the 80 percent mantra before meals (this is where you agree to eat only until you are four-fifths full) (1 minute)

  humming (3 minutes)

  brushing teeth (4 minutes)

  flossing (2 minutes)

  keeping a food diary (5 minutes)

  putting on moisturizer and sunscreen (2 minutes)

  aerobic exercise (45 minutes)

  anaerobic exercise (20 minutes)

  memorizing word of the day (1 minute)

  napping (25 minutes)

  reading before sleep (10 minutes)

  doing neck exercises (physician and author Nancy Snyderman says we should turn our head side to side five times a day to prevent neck pain) (2 minutes)

  airing out apartment (2 minutes)

  wiping down germy surfaces such as remote control, cell phone, etc. (5 minutes)

  doing crossword puzzle and other brain exercises (20 minutes)

  taking stairs instead of elevator (2 minutes)

  walking instead of taking the bus or cab (20 minutes)

  steaming vegetables (20 minutes)

  grilling salmon (20 minutes)

  making salad (20 minutes)

  putting on/taking off earphones repeatedly (1 minute)

  spending time on social interactions (1 hour)

  scrubbing vegetables to get off chemical and bacterial residue (3 minutes)

  taking supplements, including omega-3 fish oil; vitamin B12; and coenzyme Q10 (3 minutes)

  paying respect to older self (1 minute)

  petting dogs (5 minutes)

  refilling water purifier (1 minute)

  having sex (not every day, and amount of time spent is classified, per Julie)

  checking pedometer (3 minutes)

  writing list of things for which grateful (3 minutes)

  getting ultraviolet light treatment with Philips GoLite Blu Sunlight Therapy to prevent seasonal affective disorder (15 minutes)

  drinking glass of wine (10 minutes)

  I’m always looking for ways to shave time from my schedule. One of the greatest days of my life? The day I figured out how to make podcasts play at double speed on my iPhone. It works great with NPR. I also enjoy listening to a full-body relaxation course on double speed—“now-relax-your-toes-now-relax-your-calves,” though perhaps it defeats the purpose.

  My time deficiency is why I was excited to read about a newish fitness trend: the hyperefficient workout. Twenty minutes a week. Not twenty minutes a day. Twenty minutes a week.

  Welcome news.

  On a Tuesday, I take the bus down to another eccentrically capitalized place, InForm Fitness, home of the fastest workout in the land. I climb the stairs to the second floor of a building in midtown Manhattan, a space once occupied by a tuxedo shop. When I open the heavy wooden door, I find the quietest gym I’ve ever been to. No blaring Black Eyed Peas songs. No sweaty Lycra-clad runners pounding away on whirring treadmills. No clanging barbells. It’s like working out at an ashram.

  The floor is home to a collection of sleek, white weight machines. Three other clients are lifting. And I don’t see a drop of sweat on anyone’s face. One gray-haired businessman is doing shoulder presses in his oxford shirt, his tie slung over his shoulder. My kind of gym.

  The owner is a man named Adam Zickerman, a broad-chested former medical equipment salesman and longtime trainer.

  Here’s his theory in a nutshell: The key to being in shape is to exhaust your muscles. Push them to failure so they can rebuild. Cardio is one way to do that: You can exhaust your legs by running three miles. But that’s inefficient, plus there are dangers (knee problems, for instance). The best way to exhaust a muscle? By lifting heavy weights superslowly for about two minutes at a time once a week. You’ll stay in shape, get toned, and lose weight.

  It’s a startling notion. But one I don’t want to dismiss outright: There are several hundred trainers in America doing slow-cadence training, and they have the support of a handful of academics.

  I meet Adam in his office, and we talk fitness under the watchful gaze of a framed photo of Albert Einstein. I love Adam, partly for his enthusiasm, and partly because he’s prone to making sweeping statements, always good for a journalist.

  “Aerobics is a creaking edifice,” he declares.

  To him, mainstream exercise theory is deluded. It’s based on superstition, cobwebbed tradition, and pseudoscience. It’s like creationism, but with lactic acid and electrolytes.

  One of the major villains of our time, according to Adam, is Jane Fonda, but not for her support of North Vietnam. “When we look back, I believe we’ll know Jane Fonda and her ilk as the people who destroyed America’s knees.” He laughs, knowing he sounds extreme.

  But he continues: “Why would you spend six to twelve hours on cardio, when you can get the same exact thing in twenty minutes once a week?”

  Cardio defenders are fitness Luddites. “It’s like saying that the only way to type a letter is with a typewriter. You could argue, ‘When I was in college, I used a typewriter and I got through fine.’ Yeah, it got the job done. But why the F would you use it when you have a word processor?”

  Adam started his gym on Long Island in 1997, and over the years, has gotten an avalanche of publicity. He wrote a New York Times bestseller called the Power of 10. He’s been profiled in GQ and The New York Times, and featured on 48 Hours.

  Talking to Adam, I can see why. You can’t help but get swept up. He’s got preacherlike charisma. He speaks of the “fetishization of the Krebs cycle” and how aerobics release dangerous free radicals. He stands behind his desk and thrusts his arms in the air to make a point.

  After an hour, he stops. “I think I pontificated enough for now. We should work out.”

  Off we go to the workout room. I sit down at a leg extension weight machine. We won’t have to do the three typical sets of fifteen lifts. We can do it all in one shot. I’ll simply lift eighty pounds slowly till I can’t stand it any longer.

  “Ten seconds up, ten seconds down. And then repeat. Your goal is to reach muscle failure. You’ll be out of this freakin’ torturous machine in a minute and a half.”

  I push on the foot platform with my sneakers.

  “A little slower,” he says.
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  I slow down to octogenarian speed, the speed of Keanu Reeves doing kung fu in The Matrix.

  “That’s perfect.”

  I’m pushing hard. Without the momentum to help me, the weights kill my legs. I glance at Adam. “Don’t look at me for sympathy,” he says. He adds, mockingly, “Mommy, it burns!”

  But, Mommy, it does burn. It’s like having the flu and an eight-martini hangover in my thighs. I grimace and keep pushing. My legs start to shake.

  Finally, Adam counts down five-four-three-two-one . . . and I’m allowed to let the weights down.

  “Thank you for that,” he says. I had gone all the way to muscle failure. “Failure is success,” he says.

  I do five more grimace-inducing exercises—including shoulder, biceps, and chest—and say good-bye to Adam till next week.

  When I get home, I boast to Julie that I just did all my exercises for the week. She should try it instead of sweating on the elliptical every day at the gym.

  “You’re saying that what I do is bad?”

  “Well, it’s probably inefficient. And hurting your joints.”

  I expected her to roll her eyes, and maybe agree to give InForm Fitness a shot. But Julie is angry. Attacking aerobics is sacrilege, like taking on her family or her beloved Philippa Gregory novels.

  “You find one study that says aerobics is bad, and you latch onto that one!”

  When Julie is mad, she stomps. When she leaves the room, I hear the glass table rattle.

  I went to Adam’s gym a few more times, but in the end, I decide Julie has a point. I have to continue cardio.

  First, frankly, it’d be a little anticlimactic for my project to settle on a once-a-week workout. It feels like cheating, like taking a funicular up Mount Everest. It reminds me of what Adam said when I told him he should be a consultant on The Biggest Loser. “It’s not good for TV. Twenty minutes and it’s over. Okay, see you next week.” No drama. No sweat equity.

  Second, the science behind slow fitness isn’t solid enough for me, at least not yet. It may turn out to be true. It’s not inconceivable. But it needs more study. I pray it pans out. I’m all in favor of shortcuts.

  Stress-Free Friendship

  “I’m taking Alison out to cheer her up,” says Julie.

  Alison is sweet. She’s been one of my wife’s best friends since second grade. They bonded over their mutual love of Charleston Chews and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Alison happens to be going through a tough stretch. Her partner died seven years ago, and she hasn’t dated since. Then her cat died. Then her other cat died.

  “We’re having dinner at about six-thirty.”

  “That’s nice,” I say.

  “Do you want to come?”

  I pause. “It might not be the healthiest thing for me.”

  My dilemma: Hanging out with a close-knit group of friends is healthy. But what kind of friends? To be truly healthy, some research indicates you want fit and happy friends. Your social circle has enormous influence on your own behavior.

  Obesity, for one, is socially contagious, argue some scientists. A 2007 study in The New England Journal of Medicine found that a person’s chances of becoming obese increased by 57% if he or she had a friend who becomes obese, 40% if they have a sibling who becomes obese, and 37% if a spouse becomes obese.

  Surprisingly, the scientists claim this correlation was true even if the friends or family members were hundreds of miles away. The same study suggested that losing weight is also socially contagious.

  Not that Alison is overweight. She’s svelte. But the same two researchers (Nicholas Christakis from Harvard, and James Fowler from the University of California–San Diego) posit that happiness is similarly contagious. Happiness, they say, spreads like a virus even among people not in direct contact.

  A happy friend increases your chances of being happy by 15 percent.

  A happy friend of a friend boosts your chances by 10 percent.

  And a happy friend of a friend of a friend lifts your odds by 6 percent.

  The study is controversial. But if you think there’s a grain of truth to it, maybe you should avoid associating with anyone who is sad or pudgy. Maybe I should cut ties with my friend who hates his job. Or my other friend whose husband left her for a coworker. Or anyone with a BMI over thirty.

  Maybe I should skip dinner with Alison. That’d make sense in a cold-blooded Spock-like world, right?

  But it’ll also make me feel like a bastard. And just as important, when I’m depressed and fat, as I’m sure I’ll be sometime in the next decade, I’ll need the support of my friends, all of them, no matter what their waist size or serotonin level.

  I don’t explain my thinking to Julie, who has lowered her gaze and is looking at me over the top of her glasses.

  I just say: “Yeah, I’ll come. Looking forward to it.”

  Checkup: Month 10

  Weight: 157

  Bottles of flaxseed oil consumed this month: 2

  Trips to Whole Foods this month: 8

  Pounds lifted on squat machine (15 reps): 300

  Minutes of TV watched per day: 60

  Minutes of TV watched per day while standing: 30

  Project Health continues to startle me with unintended consequences. This month’s surprise: I’ve actually begun watching professional sports.

  The last time I paid much attention to team sports was when I was a kid—the year my dad took me to the legendary Game Six of the 1977 World Series. He made us leave in the seventh inning to beat the traffic. “But what if Reggie Jackson hits a third home run, Dad?” “Don’t worry. He won’t.” On the upside, we did have the subway all to ourselves.

  But now that I’m feeling more connected to those parts of me below the neck, I’ve rediscovered spectator sports. I want to see how Amar’e Stoudemire of the Knicks sprints and jumps. I want to study how Roger Federer snaps his wrist on the serve.

  This renewed interest dovetails with my sons’ innate obsession with watching men bounce and throw spheroid objects.

  Jasper and I tuned in to the Jets in the play-offs recently. And when they scored, Jasper laughed like Ray Liotta in Goodfellas, and I laughed with him, and we stomped triumphantly around the living room, doing coyote howls. So this is what all the fuss is about, I remember thinking. I’d forgotten the joys of tribalism. I’d forgotten the deep irrational pleasure of belonging to an arbitrary group.

  As with everything I do now, the question arises: Is it healthy?

  Maybe not. A study of German soccer fans found that heart attacks in men more than tripled during the World Cup on days the German team played. The stress is too much.

  But another study, published in The Journal of Clinical Hypertension, says that it might depend on which sport you watch. Football raises the blood pressure, but baseball lowers it. The latter’s nineteenth-century pace puts us into near-coma states.

  And there’s one more health benefit: Watching sports may be good for your brain. In a 2008 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, psychologist Sian Beilock says that spectators’ spatial reasoning and language skills improve when they watch sports. Which brings me to . . .

  Chapter 11

  The Brain

  The Quest to Be Smarter

  THERE IS NO BETTER TIME in history to be an idiot than right now. Never before have so many people believed that if you work hard and apply the right techniques, you can upgrade your brain and become a nonidiot.

  For decades, intelligence was thought to be fixed from birth, like eye color. You’re born smart or born dumb. You can jam more facts into your brain, but your basic intelligence—your IQ, your reasoning skills—remains static. But now? As University of Michigan professor Richard Nisbett explains in his well-respected bestseller Intelligence and How to Get It, we’re starting to discover how malleable the brain is. The scientific term is “neuroplasticity.”

  According to the metaphor du jour, the brain is like a muscle. You
can build its strength. You can keep it from withering with age.

  You can create new connections and carve new pathways among the brain’s 100 billion neurons.

  The key is to keep the brain active and challenged: do crossword puzzles, memorize poems, learn new languages. Meditation helps thicken the cerebral cortex. And make sure to eat the right brain food—namely, the good fats from nuts, olive oil, along with omega-3 fatty acids in fish. With these strategies, you can improve the brain in all areas—memory, creativity, attention, and reasoning.

  It’s a great and uplifting way to see the world. It’s very American, too. Intelligence is not an aristocracy, with each of our brains assigned to be a prince or pauper from conception. It’s a meritocracy. You work hard, and anyone can have a royal pair of frontal lobes.

  But is neuroplasticity for real? Or is it just wishful thinking? The experts I talked to say it’s a bit of both.

  On the one hand, we’re so enamored of the idea of self-improvement (me included, obviously), we latch on to promising studies and stretch them beyond recognition. Consider the so-called Mozart Effect.

  Back in 1993, three University of California–Irvine professors did a study that showed that students performed moderately better on spatial reasoning tasks immediately after listening to Mozart’s music. They were better at manipulating visual patterns in their mind. The effect lasted ten minutes. A short-term, moderate, and specific effect.

  Before the study appeared, The Associated Press ran a story with the distorted thesis: Listening to Mozart makes you smarter. The media went nuts. Mozart CD sales exploded. Pregnant mothers pressed Mozart-playing boom boxes to their stomachs. And the taken-by-surprise scientists got death threats from rock fans.

  Subsequent studies have either shown little effect, or else that Mozart wasn’t anything special. Any music temporarily improves spatial thinking. As the journal Intelligence put it recently, “Mozart Effect, Shmozart Effect.”