Keep it Short

About a decade back, I was in a downtown Starbucks, waiting to pick up my drink, when a pair of middle-aged Italian women retrieved their cappuccinos (or, rather, cappuccini) from the counter. One took a sip, and then promptly spat it back out.

“They burned the beans,” she told her friend in Italian.

“Mine too,” the friend agreed.

So they informed the baristas, and asked them to pull their drinks again. A second time through, the first woman took a sip and made a face.

“Still burnt!” she exclaimed.

At which point, I jumped in with the remnants of my college Italian, to try and explain that all Starbucks coffee was going to taste burnt, because, for whatever reasons, they’ve built their entire brand around roasting their beans to a tasteless crisp.

This was before the wide spread of ‘third wave’ coffee, so I couldn’t offer those women much in the way of alternate suggestion. But, even today, with many better coffee options all around NYC, I still sometimes end up in a Starbucks, whether because I’m on the road or just lazily settling for the closest option that has ample seating and reliable wi-fi.

And, when I do, I always order the same thing: a short cappuccino.

The short cappuccino isn’t on the menu, but they serve it at pretty much every location (barring some airport and mini-store setups). It’s a remnant of the early days of Starbucks, when they served drinks in two sizes: an 8oz Short and a 12oz Tall.

In the years since, keeping up with the general increase in American portion sizes, Starbucks added the Grande (16oz), then the Venti (20oz), and eventually the utterly ridiculous Trenta (31oz).

Somewhere along the way, they dropped the original 8oz Short from the menu, picking up flack for their smallest size therefore being called ‘tall’, but pushing up the price of the average ticket; a good trade-off. But, secretly, they kept the Short cups around. And, it turns out, a short cappuccino remains the best drink Starbucks makes.

According to the World Barista Championship rules, a cappuccino is a “five- to six-ounce beverage,” the same size served in Italian cafes. That’s because a cappuccino ideally has roughly equal parts espresso, milk, and foam. Given the physical chemistry of milk, there’s a limit to the volume of micro-foam that will hold before it collapses back on itself. So as you move to larger sizes, you end up with roughly the same amount of foam as in the Short size, and a drink that’s basically burnt-coffee-flavored milk.

Hence the short cappuccino. It’s the closest thing Starbucks sells to what you might find at a real Italian coffee bar, and it’s also one of the cheapest options on (or, rather, not on) the menu. Bevi!

An Easy Hack for Healthier Eating

There's a saying in the business world: what gets measured gets managed. That works in fitness, too.

Fortunately, when it comes to eating, it’s even easier. Science shows you don't need to measure – you just need to notice. A slew of recent studies have demonstrated that, simply by journaling what they eat, people lose literally twice as much weight as a non-journaling cohort.

The reason: most people already know how to eat better. (Eat more fruits and vegetables. Eat some protein and healthy fats. Stop eating processed crap.) Sure, we give Composite’s clients a lot of additional guidance to help them perfect their diets. But just following common sense usually gets people 80-90% of the way towards their goals.

The biggest problem, then, isn't knowledge. It’s action. With food, we too often act without thinking. We follow the dictates of our brain stem, the animal part of our brain, without stopping to consciously consider our choices.

That's where food journaling comes in. Just a brief moment of pause to document what you're about to eat is enough to trigger cortical involvement, bringing in your more evolved conscious brain. In turn, that leads people to make better, more goal-oriented choices.

There are a nearly endless number of ways to food journal. In practice, however, we find the perfect is the enemy of the good. While apps like MyFitnessPal are comprehensive, they're also a pain in the butt to reliably use, so people tend to use them for just a few days before falling off.

Instead, we’ve found a much simpler solution works just as well, yet is far easier to sustain over the long haul: use your smartphone to take take a picture of your food before you eat it.

For Composite clients, we set things up so that those pictures are submitted automatically to their coach, who can provide additional accountability. But you can also act as your own nutrition coach: every few days, look back over the food photos you’ve taken, and ask yourself what the health impact would be of keeping up that same way of eating for the rest of your life. Or consider how you would feel if you had to show the last few weeks of pictures to your physician, coach, or trainer.

If your nutrition isn’t yet dialed in, I’d highly recommend trying this out. For the next two weeks, every single time you eat something, take a photo first. It doesn’t seem like much, but science and clinical experience backs us up: it really works.

October 6, 2016

Salmagundi, Redux

I remember, back in the late '90s, seeing my friend Miles' "weblog." It was a collection of lightly-annotated links to odds and ends around the web that he had found interesting – in other words, it was literally his log of the web.

At that time, before Google and Facebook and Twitter, before endless online publications curating and aggregating, it seemed an invaluable resource, a way to find the fun and interesting and new that I'd otherwise have completely missed. After Miles', I sought out a handful of other interesting weblogs, and returned to them regularly over the weeks and months that followed.

In the two decades since, 'weblog' was elided to 'blog,' and mashed up with the sort of online journaling that appeared in Livejournal, to produce platforms like Blogger and MovableType, the progenitors of what we now think of as blogging. This site, indeed, is closer to the now-used meaning: as Wikipedia puts it, "a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries ("posts"), typically displayed in reverse chronological order, so that the most recent post appears first, at the top of the web page."

But, for the first decade of this site, I also kept a second, mini-blog in the right sidebar, one which hewed closer to the original meaning of the term. It was simply a collection of what I was watching, reading, enjoying, or pondering elsewhere on the web, linked directly with a bit of description or commentary.

I called that side-blog Salmagundi, an English word that stems from the French 'salmigondis', and means "a disparate assembly of things, ideas or people, forming an incoherent whole."

Five years ago, with Twitter growing fast (and still, at that time, only about a tenth the size that it is today), I decided to shift platforms, to ditch Salmagundi in favor of simply tweeting that kind of content instead.

And, indeed, though I've been intermittent at best in my tweets, I quickly picked up a (perhaps undeservedly) sizable audience there.

But, in the more recent past, as I've continued to follow a handful of old-style weblogs (like the great sidebar at Waxy.org), I've also started to think about the differences between Tweeting and side-blogging.

Tweets are hugely ephemeral; I almost never read back through individual users' profiles, so if I don't happen to see something when it floats down my Twitter stream, it's gone for good. Whereas, with a link-blog, even if I haven't been to the site for several weeks, I still find myself scrolling through everything that's been posted in the intervening time. Those weblogs feel to me more like, well, logs, archival indices that point to the enduringly interesting and good. They still feel, at least to me, like they’re worthwhile, even in our Twitter-ified world.

So, as of today, I’m relaunching Salmagundi over on the right-hand side of this site. The look and feel may continue to evolve a bit, and I apologize in advance if the update has broken anything for you – it turns out my PHP and CSS coding skills didn’t somehow improve on their own after a decade-and-a-half of disuse. Hopefully, you’ll find at least some of what I post as intriguing as I do. (And, if not, the site’s free; you get what you pay for.)

October 1, 2016

2016-10-01

“If a play can be summarized in three lines, it should be three lines long.” – Harold Pinter