What turns me on?

So many interesting ways to keep the fire of living burning. Some would seek for more interesting stuff to attend to. Others would just simply go with the flow. Whatever it is, it can only be done if healthy enough to carry on.

Here’s Alex Lightman’s advice  that enable him to lose 70 pounds while cutting his body fat from 33% to 16% in the past 13 months using these and other methods.

He is the author of Brave New Unwired World (Wiley 2002), the first book on 4G, and over 120 articles on business, technology and cool people. His first article was published in June ’83, the month he graduated from MIT, as the cover story for The Futurist magazine.

My advice would be to establish baselines and sophisticated objectives for strength, speed, endurance, stamina, balance, coordination, agility, skill (perhaps in a growing number of activities), days free of illness or injury, as well as body weight and, of course, the number of years spent being alive. Here are some of the tools to help achieve this.

TRANSHUMAN SUPERSHAKE
Five days a week, I fuel my body with over 200 different foods, via a 40 ounce shake that is comprised of an anti-oxidant juice like Acai or Goji berry juice; a non-dairy milk from almonds, hazelnut, rice or hemp; a banana; a raw egg; a scoop each of Jon Barron’s Private Reserve Superfood, Muscle Milk, and Greens & Whey; and small quantities of Flax oil, virgin coconut oil, Sambuca Guard, Carnitine, Creatine, Chlorophyll, Clove, Black Walnut tincture, and Pau D’arco. I also take pills with this: a multivitamin, Joint Vibrance, Q-10, Smart Blend (CLA, GLA, and Omega fatty acid complex), and Hyperdrive.

SLEEPING ATOP CHOMOLUNGMA
High altitude living enables athletes to generate more red blood cells and other adaptations that, when they return to sea level, gives them an aerobic advantage. Three companies make machines that — in combination with plastic tents or sealed rooms — allow for the gradual reduction in the amount of oxygen present. After several months of careful adaptation, one can end up with effects equivalent to sleeping on the oxygen-reduced summit of Mt. Everest. A rule of thumb is “Live high, train low.” In other words, sleep in a low-oxygen environment, but then do workouts in a normal gym, because an athlete can’t train as hard with less oxygen. The machines that suck out the oxygen cost thousands of dollars, but for people looking for an edge in their distance races, the price is worth paying.

BODY FAT ANALYSIS
There is the low budget way to do this — have a health club weigh you; then input pinches of body fat from thigh, abdomen and other places into a spreadsheet. And then there’s a more expensive way. Get yourself dunked into a tub of water and, like Archimedes in his Eureka moment, have your density measured. In any case, body fat is a more useful measure than weight, and shame on The Biggest Loser for not using it as their measure of success. The three and seven point pinch test is often done for free by gyms such as Equinox, to give you a baseline and encourage private training.

READ MORE