Drop Dead Healthy by A. Jacobs (books to read to increase intelligence .TXT) 📕

Carl Sagan quotation about skeptical open-mindedness. And you know? It works. When I’m wavering about whether to lace up my running sneakers or not, I’ll catch sight of Old A.J. Respect your elder, as disturbing-looking as he may be. This workout is for him.

The future self needs to be around for my sons. They deserve to know him.

I thought Julie would dismiss my egonomics, but she found it intriguing.

“Can you age me?” she asked. When I showed her photo to her, she burst out laughing and said she looked like Dustin Hoffman. That’s inspiring, she said. On the rare times she doesn’t feel like exercising, she’ll do it for Dustin.

Checkup: Month 2

Weight: 168

Hours of sleep per night: 6 (not good)

Visits to the gym: 12 (should have been more)

Bench press: 55 pounds, 15 reps

I lost only a pound this month, but that’s because I’m gaining muscle weight. Or at least that’s what I tell myself as I flex in my bathroom mirror searching for any microscopic changes to my biceps and chest.

I’m still doing my best to control portions. Still using my kids’ cartoon dinosaur plates at home. At restaurants, I transfer half my entrée onto the smaller butter plate, and get the other half in a doggie bag. My chew-per-mouthful ratio is ten to one, which is decent, if not great. I carry my little blue-and-white shrimp fork in my back pocket wherever I go—which has resulted in tiny holes in the back of my jeans, as well as several puzzled waiters who returned the fork to me after I accidentally left it on the plate.

So the portion size is respectable. But what should I put in those portions? I’m still struggling with what constitutes a healthy menu.

This month, at the very least, I pledged to cut down on sugar, since almost everyone agrees it’s poisonous in large doses. But the stuff is so sneaky. Case in point: I was at Newark Airport—on my way to Los Angeles for an Esquire article—and I spotted a little kiosk called Healthy Garden. That sounds promising, I think to myself. So I wander over only to find: highly salted Chex mix, plastic containers of Gummi bears and Swedish fish, “Grandma’s” chocolate chip cookie (I’m assuming from the ingredients that Grandma has a Ph.D. in chemistry from CalTech), and a “healthy mix” of fruit and nuts. The “healthy mix” contained some decent stuff, like walnuts and almonds. But it also had banana chips, which included refined cane sugar, coconut oil, and best of all, banana flavor. When you need to add banana flavor to bananas, there’s something askew with the world of food.

My sugar woes aside, I do feel slightly healthier overall. Less logy, more energetic. As if my body used to be cloudy and smog-filled (think Beijing), and now it’s only moderately polluted (maybe Houston). I like climbing a flight of stairs without my heart thumping like a cartoon animal in love.

But is that sensation worth all the hours at the gym and the dietary restrictions and extra showers? I’m not convinced. Maybe I need a break. For my next body part, I’ll do something that doesn’t require additional sweating or hunger pangs.

Chapter 3

The Ears

The Quest for Quiet

WE TOOK OUR THREE SONS to Benihana for dinner tonight. It’s their favorite restaurant, thanks to the unbeatable combination of airborne food and machete-size knives.

But healthy it’s not.

First, there’s the food, an orgy of salt and grease. Second, there’s the smoke from all the grills, which fills the room and is eyerubbingly thick, what I imagine it’d be like in a Charles de Gaulle Airport lounge circa 1965.

But what I notice tonight is the noise. The hiss of the soy sauce on the grill, the escalating chatter of the crowd. And my sons. God love them, but my sons are loud beyond comprehension. (Whenever I ask my son Zane to be quiet because his mom is napping, he’ll walk by her room shouting, “TIPTOE! TIPTOE!”)

Tonight, they’re each carrying around a little plastic trumpet they were given at a friend’s birthday. Interesting choice for a party favor. How about handing my kids a pack of Marlboros and some razors? I might have preferred that.

They’ve been tooting their horns since we left the gymnastics-themed party, so I feel like I’ve been followed around by my own private South African soccer game. Right before the appetizers come, we finally pry the ghastly things from their hands.

My goodness, it’s a loud world. I’ve started to become aware of this more and more during my health project. Just spend an hour listening. The chirping text messages, the droning airplanes, the flatulent trucks, the howling cable pundits, the chiming MacBooks, the crunching orange foodlike snacks.

Thanks to my reading, I know that noise is not a minor nuisance. No, noise is one of the great underappreciated health hazards of our time, damaging not just our hearing, but our brain and heart. It’s the secondhand smoke of our ears. Some say even worse, like aural mustard gas.

Noise pollution doesn’t get the attention of A-list diseases. There are no parades or ribbons or celebrity spokespeople. But there are a handful of brave, slightly eccentric crusaders raising their voices against the onslaught of noise. One of them—the Mother Jones of the movement—is a psychology professor at the City University of New York named Arline Bronzaft. She agrees to let me visit at her Upper East Side apartment.

A petite woman with short brown hair, Bronzaft lives in an apartment that is, appropriately, shielded from most traffic noise. It’s filled with photos of her beloved Yankees and her equally beloved grandson, who recently had a nice, restrained five-piece band at his bar mitzvah. “My daughter said to the musicians, ‘If you make it too loud, my mother will disinherit me,’” says Bronzaft.

We sit in her kitchen to talk noise.

What’s the problem with this high-decibel world?

“The most obvious one is hearing loss,” she says.

Around 26 million adults are walking around with noise-induced