By the Book

One of the craziest things about fast-changing technology is how quickly we take it for granted. For example, with Apple Maps on my phone, I’ve almost forgotten how much of traveling someplace new previously consisted of getting lost along the way. A couple months back, I went apple picking with Jess, an hour or so upstate. And, en route, I missed a turn-off from one country road to another. Armed with GPS, we rerouted, and still made it to the orchard just five minutes past the initially estimated time. But, without it, we easily could have just never found the place. In fact, even after mobile maps first became a thing, smartphones weren’t GPS enabled for a few more years, and it was still possible to get completely lost if you botched a turn. I vividly remember sitting pulled over on the side of a New Jersey highway one afternoon, scrolling endlessly around a zoomed-in map, trying to figure out where I was, so I could drop a pin and navigate the rest of the way to my destination.

Similarly, when I first moved to NYC, finding a restaurant while out and about in the city was inevitably a crap shoot. Dropped into a random neighborhood, and without Foursquare or The Infatuation (my now go-to restaurant reconnaissance pair), I had no way of figuring out what good options existed nearby.  I’d simply look for places that looked crowded, or whose signage seemed somehow appealing, and hope for the best.

But, at least, when I was back in my apartment, and planning meals in advance, I had one trusty resource: the Zagat restaurant guide.  As a budding foodie, I spent endless time pouring over its pages, and (as this was pre Resy and OpenTable) dialing for reservations.  At one point, I even hit on the idea of cycling through the guide alphabetically, eating at a restaurant whose name began with ‘A’ one week, then with ‘B’ the next.

Still, I had pretty much forgotten about Zagat entirely, until I saw, about a year and a half ago, that the aforementioned The Infatuation had just acquired the Zagat brand.  So when I got an email last spring with an invitation to submit reviews for the new 2020 New York City guide, I couldn’t resist.

By way of thanks for my additions, Zagat just sent along a copy of the finished guide:

And I couldn’t be more thrilled.

I won’t be toting it along with me day-to-day, nor honestly even consulting it regularly as my go-to for restaurant planning,

But I’m nonetheless enjoying picking it up from time to time to thumb my way through. It’s still an excellent resource. And it’s a great reminder of how lucky we are to have a web full of resources, any time we want, right there in the palms of our hands.

January 2, 2020

The Small Picture

The last year – the last decade, really – was a whirlwind. Though I’m proud of a lot that I accomplished, all too often, I had more plates spinning than I could keep up with. Work projects, hobbies, time with family and friends; it all piled into a to-do list well beyond what I could reliably complete each day. I made mistakes. Things I cared about, things that I claimed in the abstract were priorities, in practice regularly fell by the wayside. (Cf., my erratic blogging schedule here.)

So, this year, this decade, I’m doing my best to triage. I’m trying to do less, better. I’m paring down my list, focusing in on those things that really matter to me. And, hopefully, I can then do those at least slightly more consistently in the days and weeks and months ahead.

Wish me luck.

Fast Enough

New Years resolution season is bearing down upon us again. Which means, for most people (the majority in annual polls, who list ‘lose weight,’ ‘get in shape,’ or something similar as their top resolution), January will kick off with new exercise routines, new diets, and new lifestyles.

But, for almost all of those people, by the time they hit February, they’ll have given up completely, and returned to exactly what they were doing the year before.

As research on habits makes clear, one of the keys to success amongst the people who actually do manage to sustain change is starting small. Make the minimum shift needed to see results, and then build slowly from there over time. Whereas most resolutioners attempt the opposite, jumping straight to drastic change – go keto! run five miles every morning before work! – and it’s that extreme approach that so quickly derails them.

I was therefore surprised to see I’ve only mentioned in passing what I’ve generally found to be the easiest and most impactful simple first step for people looking to lose weight: intermittent fasting (or “IF,” as it’s often called).

Happily, IF isn’t just an effective way to shed excess fat; research is increasingly showing it’s likely a way to increase your lifespan, and to stave off all kinds of serious illness (whether cancer, heart disease, or diabetes), too. If you want to dive deeper, there are a ton of great resources out there: reader-friendly articles on the how and why, scientific review papers exploring the underlying journal research, even a (free!) app for timing the daily fasting window.

But, really, the core of IF is simple enough that you can jump in based on just two bullet points.

  • For 16 hours a day, don’t consume any calories. (Water, tea, and coffee are fine.)
  • For 8 hours a day, eat per usual.

And that’s it.

I do this myself, eating all of my calories between roughly 1pm and 9pm. I skip breakfast (drinking a bunch of coffee instead), have lunch at 1:00pm, eat some snacks through the afternoon at work, and then have dinner at home with Jess, before stopping eating for the night at about 9:00pm. (Depending on your own work and life schedules, feel free to shift that as needed. A bunch of my clients and friends do 12pm to 8pm, or 2pm to 10pm, though really any window works.)

Crazy enough, for almost everyone I’ve worked with, this change alone is sufficient to kick off slow and steady and sustainable leaning out. And though it sounds like it would be unpleasant, after a couple of days of adjusting to the new circadian food rhythm, people are usually so not hungry during the fasts that they’ll sometimes forget to start eating for an hour or two after the fasting window ends.

As I said, the whole thing really boils down to just that 16/8 formula. But, based on frequent questions / things I’ve seen doing and coaching this, I do have a handful of small, hopefully useful additional pointers:

  • If you normally put milk (or even better – given the lesser impact on insulin levels – cream) into your coffee, feel free to keep doing so during the fast. It doesn’t seem to make much difference.
  • If you work out during the fasting window (as I do), you’re similarly probably just fine as is. Though, if you’re trying to add muscle, and are worried missing the post-workout feeding window will undercut your ‘gainz,’ chug down 15g of essential amino acids as a pre-workout.
  • If you’re a lady, you might consider trying a 14-hour fast and a 10-hour eating window instead. Some women seem to have hormonal side effects (irregular periods, bone density decreases) when doing 16/8 over the long-term. A 14/10 approach appears to provide the vast majority of the same benefits, but without triggering female-specific side effects.
  • And, finally, while the first step is indeed to just change food timing, without shifting or limiting what you eat during the eight-hour window (as that’s enough to kick off fat loss and biomarker improvements by itself), achieving optimal health and fitness probably involves making other (fortunately similarly incremental) changes over time. Still, as I said before, starting with a manageable beachhead like IF’ing, and quickly seeing results, tends to lead much more effectively to long-term success – and further positive changes over time – than just trying to do everything all at once, and then dropping it all after two or three weeks.

So, in short, if you have physique (or general health) resolutions in mind this year, consider giving Intermittent Fasting a whirl. Hell, you can even hop in today, and roll into the New Year with two weeks of practice – which, in turn, should substantially up the odds that you’ll keep sticking with it, and keep seeing real results, over the year ahead.

December 16, 2019