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

“Did you ever meet Clarence Darrow?” I ask.

My grandfather shakes his head.

“But I did see him speak once at City College,” he says.

“You remember anything he said?”

“I do remember.”

“And?”

“Well, it was about the sheer improbability that we even exist. The strange fact that out of millions of people in the world, your mother and father met and decided to get married to each other. And out of the millions of sperm, that the one with your genes was the one that made it to the egg and fertilized the egg. I’ll never forget it.”

It’s a little weird to hear your ninety-four-year-old grandfather talk about sperm. But it’s still a great point. We should be amazed we exist at all. We ought to be in a constant state of wonder. Maybe we should spend fifteen minutes on a blueberry after all.

Checkup: Month 1

It’s been a month since I began Project Health. Here’s where I am: I’ve lost three pounds. The blue digits on my bathroom scale stop flickering at 169. In Julie’s estimation, I’ve gone from looking four months pregnant to three and a half months. This mindful eating is working, at least a little.

Mindfulness has been the big theme of the month. It’s invaded every part of my life. Thanks to reading piles of books about health, I’ve become excruciatingly aware of all my body parts.

When I breathe, I picture the tiny alveoli sacs in my lungs swelling with air. As I type, I visualize the stringlike flexor muscles tugging on my finger bones. As I eat, I imagine the pancreas squirting out its enzyme-filled juice, which swarms the peanut butter in the small intestine.

It’s a mixed blessing, this mindfulness. Because with it comes anxiety. Lots of it.

I’m more aware of all the horrible ways my body can malfunction. The Centers for Disease Control lists hundreds of diseases, running alphabetically from abdominal aortic aneurysm (a ballooning of the aorta) to zygomycosis (a fungal infection). I watched a TED talk from a doctor who said that our bodies are made of 300 trillion cells, and each of these cells is constantly replicating, and it takes just one of those replications to go slightly awry and a cancer could be born. My mother warned me this would happen. She told me the story—which is only half apocryphal—that med students panic their first year when they learn all the diseases. It’s not until the second year that they learn the cures.

I’m more aware of my body’s many imperfections, the aching lower back, the receding gums, the posture of an exhausted marathoner in the twenty-fifth mile.

I’m more aware of all the many, many changes I have to make to be optimally healthy. That fifty-three-page to-do list I keep on my desk, it haunts me.

My overall strategy is to emphasize one body part at a time. That said, whenever there’s an opportunity, I’m also checking off items on the list—no matter which body part is my focus that day.

Last week, for instance, I passed by a plant shop, and stopped in to buy an Areca palm, a task on the fourth page of the list. It’s supposedly good for air quality. Unfortunately, its fronds engulfed our entire living room. The boys had to eat dinner hunched over to avoid the branches. Julie made me return it. I replaced it with five smaller plants known, poetically enough, as mother-in-law’s tongue (they got their name because of the sharpness of the leaves). Mother-in-law’s tongue also effectively cleans the air, according to a NASA study.

But there are hundreds of things left to do. I have to start sleeping longer. I have to eat better and stop swiping mac ’n cheese and pizza crusts off my kids’ plates. And exercise. Aside from an occasional quarter-mile jog in the park, which wipes me out for the next two days, I haven’t yet begun to sweat. That’s got to end. Or to start.

Chapter 2

The Heart

The Quest to Get My Blood Pumping

I’VE NEVER BEEN A FAN of exercise. I haven’t worked out at a gym my entire adult life, a fact Julie finds deeply upsetting. I have several arguments to justify this.

Argument 1: The Jim Fixx argument.

Here we have perhaps the most classic line of reasoning against exercise, and against healthful living in general. I’ve heard it often, and I’ve repeated it just as often. It goes like this:

Jim Fixx—the man who helped start the modern fitness revolution, the author of the 1977 classic The Complete Book of Running—died at age fifty-two. He collapsed of a heart attack after his daily run in Vermont. So why bother? You never know when death will take you.

The brilliant comic Bill Hicks—who himself died young, at age thirty-two, of pancreatic cancer—had a famous bit about Jim Fixx. He imagines an angry Fixx in the afterlife grumbling that he jogged every morning, ate nothing but tofu, and swam five hundred laps a day, and now he’s dead. Whereas hard-living actor Yul Brynner drank, chain-smoked, and had young women stroking his “cue-ball head” every night of his life. And he’s dead, too. At which point the frustrated Fixx utters a long, stretched-out “shiiiit.”

My friend Paul gave me his own version of this argument recently. Actually, he whispered it to me, because he didn’t want our wives—both gym fanatics—to overhear us. “Think about it. An hour a day. That’s three hundred hours a year. That’s three thousand hours in ten years. Think of all the crops that could be planted in that time. Think of all the community service that could be done. And you’re extending your life. Why? So you can have five more years of drooling in a bucket?”

Argument 2: In the end, medical advances will save us.

The old long bet. It’s another favorite of mine. My friend and former intern Kevin—who is just as bad an influence as Paul—put it this way: “I don’t smoke, but I would consider starting. Because it takes,