• Exercise protects your brain as you age.

• More proof that your body actively regulates your level of fat mass: liposuction doesn’t work over the long term.

• The 6 most horrifying lies the food industry is feeding you.

• As a pseudonymous blogger, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point you towards this argument that pseudonyms increase honesty.

• Stress is killing you.

• “The web is a barn we raised together. ” Alexis Allen was a pioneer on the web and one of the inspirations for this blog. As she rightly points out, today’s technology industry (including Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook) are providing valuable products. But as they grow, we might also be losing something.

• A diet high in fruits and vegetables can help protect against cardiovascular disease. Note the recurring connection to inflammation.

• It’s important to remember that confidence is a feeling that can easily mislead us. The perception that we are skilled at something can easily be an illusion that can lead us astray, especially in fields (like law) where feedback is subjective, irregular, unreliable, or distanced in time from the original decision. So it’s important to always look for evidence of our own incompetence, and to only trust thinkers (or professionals) that routinely receive rigorous, prompt feedback and admit to uncertainty about their conclusions.

• Stanford Sapolsky (previously) on the physiology of depression.

• A parable on good intentions.

There are good reasons to exercise beyond physical fitness.

“Richard Friedman believes in exercise as part of the treatment for depression. His patients often have the worst prognoses; by the time they get to his clinic at Cornell, most have already tried the general-practitioner, take-some-Prozac route.

‘I see people who are very, very severely depressed, people who are treatment resistant,’ Friedman says. ‘I make them exercise. First, I find out what they like to do – hopefully, there’s something. If they don’t have anything they like to do, I make them joing a gym, or I tell them they have to go out walking in the morning and increase their walk each day by a couple of minutes.’ Patiens often are taken aback, he admits. ‘They look at me like I’m crazy – I’m a psychopharmacologist,’ he explains.

Of course, he prescribes antidepressent drugs. ‘I’ve never treated anyone with exercise alone,’ Friedman says. But he always adds an exercise prescription to a drug prescription. ‘I would say that they all report that within ten minutes after stopping exercise they definitely have an improved mood and it lasts for several hours, which is much faster than antidepressants.’”

– Gina Kolata, Ultimate Fitness: The Quest for Truth About Exercise and Health, pg. 126-31.

The QOTD, on the impact of stress on diet:

“Stress also lends more power to each of the mechanisms that drive overeating through its capacity to heighten our arousal. ‘If you’re in an agitated state, a stimulus will act on you more, will generate a little more vigor,’ said Bernard Balleine [of UCLA]…

By intensifying my arousal and approch behavior, stress steamrolls over the cognitive voice that had been trying to say no to the cue [presented by a plate of cookies]. ‘When you get into this slightly aroused state, the strongest cue in the environment will tend to elicit the motor response it has been associated with in the past,’ [Balleine] said…

‘Is there any evidence that food really makes you feel better after you’ve eaten?’ I asked Loma Flowers, a community psychiatrist in San Fransisco. ‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘People feel better after eating it. They eat for anxiety. And it soothes anxiety. It really does work like a Valium.’ But that effect, of course, is momentary.

When we learn that a stimulus provides gratification, that knowledge drives our wanting, arousing us further. Our focus narrows to the target of our desire, capturing our full attention and directing us toward it. The anticipation of feeling better puts us in a heightened state of focus, making us want it all the more.

What we fail to realize is that the food we ate for comfort has left its mark on the brain, creating a void that will need to be filled the next time we are cued. The result is a spiral of wanting.”

- David A. Kessler, The End of Overeating, pg. 152-53.

The QOTD, on the impact of emotions on diet:

“Among people who experience conditioned hypereating, emotional states often heighten the power of cues, overpower executive control, and intensify the drive to eat. ‘It’s a form of self-medication,’ said George Koob, at the Salk Institute. ‘You’re modulating your arousal. People take the food to calm themselves down.’

Rajita Sinha, at Yale University’s School of Medicine, said that sadness and anger have the greatest potential to drive a loss of control… Because a cookie makes me feel better, it’s easy to develop the habit of seeking it out when I’m sad or angry. Over time, as neural pathways link the change in my mood with the experience of eating the cookie, the association grows stronger.

‘These products have some kind of hedonic, calming effect,’ said Koob. ‘In other words, they relieve the itch.’ The problem is that the itch comes back.

Anger and anxiety can act as a ‘setting condition’ for cues, says Charles O’Brien, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. ‘A cue that has been extinguished in the basal state [when the body is calm] again becomes active in producing craving and physiological changes when it is presented after a person has been put in an angry state…’

The effect is visible in imaging studies in which people undergo brain scans as they respond to cues suggesting they’re about to get a milkshake. In one study, researchers first induced a negative mood by playing some dark music and asking participants to recollect a particularly depressing life experience. Afterward, the regions of the brain where the reward pathways operate showed greater activity level in response to the anticipated milkshake compared with levels among participants in the neutral mood.

‘We interpreted those findings as suggesting that when emotional eaters are in a negative mood, the idea that they are about to get a milkshake makes them anticipate reward,’ said Eric Stice, a scientist at the Oregon Research Institute. ‘That’s not the case for nonemotional eaters…”

When emotions amplify reward, the drive for reward becomes even harder to control.”

- David A. Kessler, The End of Overeating, pg. 150-51.

• Here’s a simple meditation primer that will teach you the basics of meditation in just a few minutes.

• “The biggest lie we tell ourselves is that meditating is not a high priority… But I don’t want to sound too girly when I tell you to meditate. So I’m telling you instead that the Marine Corps is using meditation to help troops cope with the stress of warfare. Imagine fifty guys sitting cross-legged, eyes shut, with a rifle in every lap. The Marines were totally skeptical at first, of course, but in Men’s Journal (one of my favorite magazines) there’s a great article by Vanessa Gregory about how the Marines became believers.”

Alex Payne recently wrote out some tips for staying healthy while working in an extremely demanding startup environment. But his tips are equally applicable to attorneys with demanding jobs (such as those attorneys slaving away at a large law firm), so recommend them to you.

Aside from time management skills, his tips are straightforward but under-appreciated. First, make sure you exercise regularly, no matter how busy you are, because it will help you get more done in the long run:

This is a no-brainer: get as much exercise as you possibly can. I try to exercise daily. I work out for three reasons: stress relief, energy, and long-term health… I’m not a naturally athletic person, and going to the gym is usually utterly unappealing after a long day. At the end of a good workout, though, I always feel calmer than when I started. Exercise boosts my mood and makes me more able to see negative or combative situations from a more positive perspective. Startup life will sap your energy. At first, it’s easy to operate on sheer enthusiasm. Over time, though, even the most exciting job becomes work. Working out can tire out the muscles, but I find that it energizes my mind.

Next, recognize that your input (food) impacts your output (cognition), and eat clean:

My metabolism sucks. My ancestry is primarily a mix of English and German, and as a result I’m genetically optimized for storing fat through a chilly European winter (also for arch looks and laconic humor). If I don’t eat carefully, I gain weight, and if I gain weight, I look and feel like crap. Without strict rules about what I can and can’t eat, I’ll find myself eating whatever’s around, particularly when I’m stressed from work. To combat this, I set very clear guidelines about what I eat and drink, and when. Programmers notoriously live on caffeine and sugar. I refuse to cut the caffeine out of my diet, but the biggest change I’ve made for myself is cutting out refined sugar… I’ve also removed most “bad” carbohydrates and starches from my diet. I avoid bread, pasta, white rice, potatoes, etc. So yes, that means no sandwiches, no noodles, no fries; none of a lot of things that I enjoy…

I just try to eat fresh vegetables, lean protein, low-fat dairy, nuts, and fresh fruit. This regime removes a huge number of readily available and hideously unhealthy foods as meal options. Being able to say, “nope, that’s just not in the category of things that I eat” is helpful when confronted with a menu or grocery store full of choices… The point of all these dietary changes is primarily about achieving constancy. Yes, it’s nice to lose some weight, but by sticking to the above rules, my energy level throughout the day remains the same. Removing the sugar and carbs means that I don’t peak and trough. I generally feel less ruled by food, and it’s easier to make dietary decisions now that I have a framework.

And finally, make the time to see the big picture:

This is probably the most important of the changes I’ve made. Regular meditation is absolutely essential to maintaining quality of life for me. It keeps me calm and focused, and helps me sort out personal and professional conundrums… The hardest part of meditation is making the time to do it. Realistically, you need about 20 minutes per NSR session. While that doesn’t sound like much, adding 20 minutes to your morning and evening routines is harder than you think. It’s entirely worth it, though. Meditation cuts right through feelings of being stressed-out and overwhelmed, and neatly organizes thoughts and emotions. More than once, I’ve been meditating and have had the solution to a problem I’ve been struggling with pop to the forefront of my mind. That’s time well spent. In a way, meditation is an investment in the quality of time spent not meditating. Even if you don’t have any magic moments of clarity while sitting there with your eyes closed, you’ll probably find that the rest of your day just feels better when you meditate regularly. At the very least, meditation makes my work time more productive, and that alone makes it worthwhile for me.

In other words, these tips boil down to one principle: no matter how stressed you are, or how unreasonably demanding your client or partner is being, or how busy you are, never, ever sacrifice the long term for the short term. You’ll regret it down the road.

• Here are the incredibly depressing results of one of the longest and most robust weight loss studies I’ve seen to date. After two long years (with various groups trying low-carb diets, low-fat diets, and everything in between): “Among the 80% of participants who completed the trial, the average weight loss was 4 kg; 14 to 15% of the participants had a reduction of at least 10% of their initial body weight.”

• Why food is getting sweeter.

• The science of obesity and processed foods, from a former FDA commissioner: “The latest science seemed to suggest being overweight was my destiny. I was fat because my body’s ‘thermostat’ was set high. If I lost weight, my body would try to get it back, slowing down my metabolism till I returned to my predetermined set point… ‘Higher sugar, fat and salt make you want to eat more.’ I had read this in scientific literature, and heard it in conversations with neuroscientists and psychologists. But here was a leading food designer, a Henry Ford of mass-produced food, revealing how his industry operates. To protect his business, he did not want to be identified, but he was remarkably candid, explaining how the food industry creates dishes to hit what he called the ‘three points of the compass’. Sugar, fat and salt make a food compelling. They stimulate neurons, cells that trigger the brain’s reward system and release dopamine, a chemical that motivates our behaviour and makes us want to eat more.”

• Meditation may help relieve the uniquely modern types of stress that evolution arguably did not prepare us to deal with.

• How to train to do one hundred pushups.

• Why DRM doesn’t work.

• How to always get free shipping on Amazon.