My Unremarkable Brain

I’ve fallen in love with Nina Teicholz.  I’m reading her 2014 book The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat & Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet . Part scientific text, part history, part whodunit, the book asks the question: how did dietary fat get the bad rap it has today, and is it deserved? (Spoiler alert: no).   As a Big Guy of a certain age, on a ketogenic diet for epilepsy , I have certain concerns: what about cholesterol?  What about saturated fat? What about heart disease?  This is why I picked up Big Fat Surprise .  I’m only halfway through, but the book has blown my mind several times already.  The revelations of how soft money, politics, and prejudice form the basis of American dietary guidelines are pretty shocking. (For example, did you know that the famous “ Food Pyramid ” was written by a single, vegetarian-leaning congressional staffer who had no background in science, and with no consensus from the academic community?)....

Here we go again, folks.  Sunsets are getting earlier and temps are getting cooler, which can only mean one thing: sugar.   It’s well known that the holiday season is when we tend put on extra pounds ,  even though, as fitness guru Vinnie Tortorich says, “It’s not what you do between Christmas and New Year’s that matters, it’s what you do between New Year’s and Christmas.” Part of this may be the much-maligned Christmas Creep .  It’s not enough that we have a couple of cookies and milk on Christmas Eve, we tuck into the candy canes and egg nog for a full month ahead of time. But if you think about it, is it more than just Christmas that's to blame?  If we open up the definition of “holiday season” a bit, a picture starts to form.   Here’s a quick rundown of some fall and winter holidays (both religious and secular, real and made-up).  What traditional foods come to mind? September - Pumpkin Spice Everything Season begins. Oct...

Last night, Judy and I met up with some of my old college buds, who were in town for the weekend.  Jim and Mary were the Peter Pan and Wendy of the Lost Boys that were our college rowing crew.  Twenty years later, they’re still the warmest, funniest couple you could ever meet.  We spent hours doing the old where-are-they-now, catching up on our former teammates, talking and laughing, reminiscing and wacking philosophical about life.  It was a fantastic time. “We were such a bunch of clowns,” I mused at one point, “it’s amazing we could even get the boat down the course.” “But you know,” Jim countered, “we actually did okay.  Surprisingly, we had some solid wins in there.” All of which has me thinking about the secret sauce of winning in athletics and life: friendship .  (Yeah, we’re going cheesy today.)  Over the course of just a few years, the guys on my crew somehow went from an assortment of goofballs, to teammates, to lifelong friends....