Airplane pilots have an aircraft checklist, and you should have a body checklist. Pilots don’t take off in an airplane without knowing their equipment is good, so why do so many people not know the real state of their body? One needs to have a body checklist.

Do you have sleep apnea?

Do you have stuff in your teeth?

Are you using your bad eye to shoot a gun?

Does your breath smell?

Have you had your hearing checked?

Is your vision weird?

Is one arm longer than the other?

Your body is the most important vehicle you’ll ever own. Shouldn’t it get checked out more often than your car or bike?

Guess what weight you need to be to be obese? It’s much lower than you think. Check your body mass index (BMI). Calculate BMI by dividing weight in pounds (lbs) by height in inches (in) squared and multiplying by a conversion factor of 703. This gives you a number.

For example, 220 lbs / 4,900 (70 inches squared) x 703 = 31.5 BMI. This is obese.

Here’s the chart:

Environment is key. Cut out the blue light. Use Flux software (turns screen into warmer tone that does not interfere with sleep quality).

Your body has evolved for some activity during the day. Work out hard during the day and you’ll sleep like a baby at night.

Mindset is important too. Feel good going to sleep early by thinking of tomorrow’s great performance.

Learn to see the profit in feeling great and being well rested tomorrow. Realize that whatever you’re doing that you want to stay up late for right now, and screw up tomorrow, it just seems important because it’s urgent and present now, but it’s probably actually much less important that what you’ll be doing the next day.

If you’re up when other people are, you can work with them. How many things are happening late at night are actually time limited? You’ll likely find that the most important things that go on in the world are actually happening during the day. Anything that requires massive cooperation or media impact, or results in profit, occurs mostly in the daytime because that’s when most of the other people are up and kicking ass.

Are you getting enough good sleep really? You might want to try a sound machine for sleep, e.g. Marpac.

The fuel you use to be you is oxygen. Without oxygen, you stop being you, rather rapidly and permanently. You’re nearly more a being of oxygen than anything else.

Sleep apnea is a problem. My father existed as a zombie for many years. “There are estimates that only 20% of sleep apnea in Americans is diagnosed. How many other people out there are still stumbling along on their fourth or fifth antidepressant when CPAP is what would actually help?

Seems like 3 minutes, 3 days, 3 weeks, air, water, food—you need them in the order that they’re available to consume in a primitive world. If the world were different, we would need these things in a different order.

Hypoxia is a condition in which the body or a region of the body is deprived of adequate oxygen supply at the tissue level. The effects of hypoxia at high altitude: you die totally happy, thinking everything is going just dandy.

Amazingly, high-altitude peoples of Tibet, Ethiopia, and the Andes have been living at altitudes of 2,500 to 4,000 meters for millennia and are protected from these conditions.

Pressure-related stuff really messes with your brain. You take a diver deep and they’ll feel just fine while under nitrogen narcosis.

My scariest example was when I saw another diver having trouble getting his buoyancy right and not responding to my signals to add air to his buoyancy compensator (less air in his BC under pressure and a compressed wetsuit makes the diver less buoyant). I decided to write down instructions on my slate and had him read it, and he still wasn’t getting it, and was looking kind of freaked out, so I called an end to the dive. He got better once we’d ascended and he wasn’t high, and we got to the surface just fine a few minutes later.

I started explaining his issues and showed him my slate again. I had scribbled complete gibberish on the slate - like letters on top of each other and random squiggles. I knew he was having narc issues and what he needed to do to control his dive, but had no idea I’d lost the ability to write due to my own narcosis. It kind of freaked me out.

If you’re a giant fat fellow, it seems as though you’re very far from your goal of being fit, because if you diet a whole day, you are like .01%, or some small percentage, closer to your goal, right? The fatter you are and the skinnier you need to be, then the smaller the percentage toward your goal you actually are. If you look at it in percentage terms, you’re far away from your goal the fatter you are, which is discouraging.

If you look at it instead in linear terms instead of percentage terms, and you just say, how much weight can I lose in a week? Well then, as a fat guy, you’re actually at an advantage, because you can lose more weight in a day because your body’s just smoking through calories much faster. One way, you’re very disenchanted, which is probably the wrong way to view it in that you’re farthest possible away from your goal because you’re a monster. The other way is probably a better way to look at it, which is because it’s much easier for you to make linear progress because you actually use so many calories at rest during the day.

It can be more fun to visualize weight loss or other goals by their distance and not their time, because you can accelerate how much distance you cover, but you can’t accelerate time. For instance, if you need to lose 10 lbs., that’s the same as 3,500 kilometers on a stationary bike. We’ve evolved to hoard physical things that are countable, and thus having a distance goal can feel like collecting something valuable. Having a time goal is a layer or two removed.

Eat to live, don’t live to eat, at least in terms of quantity. You don’t need much quantity to have quality. When you eat you must see how little you can eat, not how much. You’ve already tried eating how much you can get away with, and where has that gotten you?

The difference between a 6-inch sub and a 12-inch sub is 45 lbs.

If you have three extra sodas a day, you will be roughly 45 lbs. heavier for the rest of your life. That’s how powerful calories are. Consequently, if you drink three sodas less a day—and we are talking normal cans of soda, not the monstrosities you can find for sale at your local convenience store—you will lose weight.

You will find by surveying people that they don’t know how many calories turns into a pound. Knowing how many calories you are eating is only useful to you if you know how those calories are going to affect you. That is only possible if you know how many calories a day your body actually uses.

You also can’t have false beliefs about how many calories exercise is worth. If you exercise on a bike for 20 minutes and burn 300 calories, you can’t then have a snack to reward yourself. Almost any popular, pre-made snack you reach for is going to have more than 300 calories in it.

You spend less money on food by eating less as well. You spend less time eating. You spend less time traveling to eat. That saves you money on gas and the likelihood of an accident. Your chance to live longer increases. You’ll be healthier and have a better immune system. Fit into more common and more stylish clothing. You’ll be faster. Need less sleep. That means more time awake to enjoy all these other benefits. Most important of all, you will look better in a bathing suit.

Just to overkill on it, you’ll also serve as an example to your loved ones, be able to flee and chase faster, and are likely to be paid more at your work, fit through tighter spaces, set off the alarm on the elevator less, pay less for health insurance, need to use the health insurance that you may already have less, cause the death of fewer animals or plants or likely both. You will also use ever so slightly less gasoline commuting to work. There’s a whole lot of upside here. You’re also less of a target if you play dodge ball or paintball.

In a world where we’re much more limited by how much we emotionally want something than by our intellectual ability to understand how to get it, it’s more important to have a consuming desire and drive towards something, than it is to optimize how you get to the goal. A great plan not executed is far worse than an average plan executed well, at least where matters of life and death and injury are not as large a concern. That’s why the “why” doing of something is much more important than the “how,” as far as motivation is concerned. For a person who already has strong enough “why’s” and is already dedicating the hours, for those few, the “how” is far more important.

How do you make sure that you’re hitting the right caloric intake? First, know how many calories you actually use in a day. If you only eat foods that have a known caloric value, it will be much easier to add up how many calories you eat in a day. Some people have good luck with an app called MyFitnessPal. Using WolframAlpha.com, you can calculate your basal metabolic rate (BMR). This is the amount of calories you burn a day with no exercise, or if you choose it, whatever level of exercise you think matches your day.

There are no magic people. These numbers have been proven over and over again. You eat over your BMR, and you gain weight. You eat under your BMR, and you lose weight. Watching your calorie count beats and crushes every other form of weight loss trickery. This includes food mixing and matching, protein vs. carb vs. fat macro ratios, exercise, food timing, alternate fasting, alkaline diets, stimulants—you name it. It all gets crushed by the basic calorie count. Which is why there’s a very simple tried-and-true formula that predicts whether you will lose weight or not, and it doesn’t ask you or want to know whether you are doing any of those other things at all. If you think the BMR calorie calculator is wrong, please document how your results differed from what the proven 50-year-old math predicted, so that you and the others like you can improve the math formula. Like so many other things, though, it’s usually the case of bad math or bad measurements than it is that science needs to update the formula.

Think of all the benefits you get from having less caloric intake. Often, people don’t understand or are blissfully unaware about how crappy some things in life really are. Your teeth, for example. They don’t really heal. If you break a leg, good chance it’s going to heal. If you break a tooth, it’s permanent. It’s not going to heal itself.

What does this have to do with food? Just like waves eroding a beach, slowly but surely, and the chewing of food and other things like ice and gum also erode your teeth away. Since they never heal, the more you eat, the more you chew, the sooner you will not have teeth left. In the good ole days when we didn’t have cool tools like tooth brushes, tooth paste, and all of the other fun things that you can find in the drugstore aisle, your wisdom teeth might have had some use when they come in to push all the other teeth forward and close the gaps from the teeth you’d be missing. Maybe you were missing one because you said the wrong thing to tribal leader’s girlfriend, or maybe you bit into an extra hard animal part for food. Nowadays we take such good care of our teeth that we don’t really want them shifting around so much up in the front there, and all of us has met a person or two that appears to have way too many teeth in their mouth all crooked and crossed over each other.

If you eat less often, you may have better teeth health. Why? Because there’s less chance for gunk to get applied to them. If you drink your coffee through a straw, it has less time on your teeth and therefore, your teeth are less likely to get stained. Well, it’s the same thing with eating right. If you eat less often but larger quantities, there’s less time that the particles get to stay on your teeth.

You know who’s really good at dieting? Everyone who’s not fat. As a matter of fact, people who are not fat never got fat enough to have to lose the weight, so they may be the best at dieting of all.

Fat joke: To make fun of someone that is chubby you could say that when they were swimming you’d hope that a shark doesn’t bite them so that the shark doesn’t get high cholesterol.

Dieting beats exercise for weight loss.

The rate which you can gain weight is limited by an unconscious autonomic system that is always working, whether you mentally will it to do so or not. This is your digestive system.

So on the intake side, you’ve got a constantly working machine that takes whatever you put in and turns it into nice fat stores for you, so you don’t starve to death. Nice tummy.

Now on the output side, you have basically the same autonomic system of breathing and staying warm, which if it was balanced well enough with your intake side, you’d probably have already skipped this chapter, being already fit and all. So now you have to engage your conscious will power to help generate heat and movement to get rid of the excess energy stored in your fat. Well, that is definitely not autonomous, so now you have an autonomous system working quite easily against your will power. The will power is at a distinct disadvantage.

Time to shove a burger in your face, chew and swallow it? Oh, a minute or two.

Time to exercise at full tilt to burn off that cheeseburger? 30 minutes. Full tilt for most people will really take about 45 minutes. If you’re on the stationary bike at the gym and you’re going 10 miles an hour, then you’re in for 45 minutes before you burn off that cheeseburger. So in cheeseburgerland, it takes 45 minutes of brisk biking to cancel out three minutes of normal eating. That’s a 12 to 1 ratio. This is why cutting the calories going in is more effective than trying to out-exercise a bad diet. And really, if you briskly put as much effort into eating that burger as you do biking at 10 mph, the ratio would be 45 to 1, because who couldn’t scarf down a cheeseburger in a minute if they wanted to?

Think of food in cheeseburger units.

A funny favorite unit for dieting, the cheeseburger. Cheeseburgers are about 300 calories each. To lose a pound of fat, you have to cut out or use about 12 cheeseburgers.

Instead of eating it and trying to burn it off, choose to not eat that tasty thing.

It’s not as easy to not eat 12 cheeseburgers you otherwise wanted to. On a dare you can easily eat 12 cheeseburgers in an afternoon. Basically, the rate which you can gain weight is 10 times faster than the rate that you can lose weight.

If you’re using food to change the way you feel, then you’re always going to tend to have more calories input than you need. Food already tastes amazing as is, without the added benefit of being used as a mood-altering substance. Those two combined can make weight loss nearly impossible.

It’s easier to pass over food for a few seconds on a store shelf than it is to avoid eating too much of it every day if you bring it home.

Calorie counts are all wrong because they include the calories you would have burnt anyway just sitting there. So you take your BMR and you add your exercise calories, and you think that is how many you used, but it’s wrong, because a 240 lb. guy burns about 100 calories an hour just sitting there, breathing. So if you work out for 10 hours, and add that to your day’s burn, you will be off by 10 hours of 100 calories where you were double-counting the rest calories, once in the BMR and once in the calorie counter. This gets even worse the more hours a day you work out. So if you work out 10 hours, your calorie counts are off by 1,000 calories.

Bananas are all clones. There used to be another option, but it died off. If you like the idea of a Paleo diet, you’ll have to just like the idea, because everything that you would have eaten back then doesn’t exist anymore. We improved it all, flavor and size-wise.

You know what, you can make a little change in the way you eat, and just stop eating when you’re satisfied, instead of full. “Hara hachi bu” is a Japanese term meaning “Eat until you’re 80% full.” It originated in the city of Okinawa, where people use this advice as a way to control their eating habits.

Drink water, and you’re going to lose a lot of weight. It’s free, it’s awesome, everything’s better, your teeth are better. Therefore, let’s do the smarter thing, the smarter thing is to drink water instead of Coke, the smarter thing is to stop eating before you’re full, the smarter thing is to drink the water before you eat, so you’re already more full. Your stomach’s stupid, it can’t tell whether there’s water or food in there, it just knows you’re stuffed.

Check out examine.com and you’ll see most supplements don’t do much for you. Do you know how do they decide what the US recommended daily allowance of a vitamin is? They keep increasing the dose of the vitamin until you’re pissing it out, and then whenever you start pissing it out, that’s the daily recommended value. Because they assume your body used it and so it’s not so bad to eat it. That’s the daily allowance.

That seems to be like a silly way to do it. Because things like catalysts exist. There are things that may not get metabolized. You will piss it out but it’s presence in higher or lower quantities in your body will cause effect.

When you eat supplements, they’re said to be good for you, but quite often, they’re not, because there’s something else going on that we don’t know about. For instance, eating fish. We know eating fish is good, and we know eating processed fish oil isn’t as good. We know eating calcium in food is good, and calcium pills aren’t as good. There’s either some other things in there that we haven’t discovered yet, or, it’s a combinations of things that are important. To give you an idea of how complicated the biological world is, certain compounds have a right and left turn. They’re the same molecule, just different shapes. And that shape can kill you. Prion disease is a misshaped protein in your brain. Its geometry causes other proteins to get messed up, just like it is. Therefore combinations and catalysts play a huge role.

You can avoid toilet water splash, and have a quieter pooping experience if you drop a piece of toilet paper in first.

For men, you can pee quietly by peeing on the side of the bowl. You cannot have a split beam pee all over the bathroom experience if you pre-spread the opening of your expelling point. This is a bigger problem the more you ejaculate, for it seems that fluid likes to seal the end more than pee.

People in poorer countries tend to have less hemorrhoids because they squat more often than they sit to poop. It’s also likely that they consume less food, and therefore use their colon less often and at lower volumes.

Either way, it seems like the animal world has decided that all peeing will take 30 seconds regardless of your size, and that squatting is a pretty cool way to poop if you’re a land-based mammal.

Apparently if you change the position of your legs and you squat while you defecate, or maybe you lean over real far on the toilet, it helps with your process.

Warm up the water while you’re finishing your business, so it’s ready for blasting your nether regions in the cleanup/paperwork phase. You don’t have a way to rinse your butt? Well, the Europeans really got this one right. With a bidet, you’ll use much less toilet paper, and have a much cleaner butt if. Water is your friend.

Some small amount of toilet paper dust and crap dust makes its way into the air when you wipe, so it’s not vital, but slightly cool, to shield your tooth brush, rinsing glass, floss, tongue scraper, etc. from the crap dust.

Tongue scrapers are awesome. Most of what causes bad breath is the crap that lives on your tongue. Some folks unfortunately have extra spaces in the backs of their throats where food gathers and rots, and creates tonsillitis. Google that word at your own peril. If you have these things, you really have to get rid of them manually, or have a professional do it, or your breath will always smell terrible. If you want a more permanent solution, they can laser off the area to make it so food can’t get stuck in there.

Use Xylitol and fluoride mints, floss/brush/Waterpik as soon as you can after eating.

Chew only as hard as needed, as teeth break on bones in meats.

Never chew ice.

Floss and brush as soon as you can after every time you eat or drink sugary stuff. If you knew what it costs to fix your teeth, you’d take even better care of them. They don’t regrow or heal. You have to do everything you can to keep them in good shape. The biggest problem they have are these little creatures that live on them. They eat part of what you eat, especially sugar. The problem is that when they crap out what they eat, the acid eats into your teeth. You can starve them by eating less sugar, and make it harder for them to stick to your teeth with Xylitol gum or mints. Make sure they don’t have homes to live in. They make houses on your teeth called biofilm, or calculus or tartar. Get your teeth cleaned by a professional. Don’t leave food on your teeth for them to eat. You can also shake them up with an ultrasonic tooth brush, reach hard to reach spots with a Waterpik.

Fix your teeth, smile more, or just be cool with freaking people out with your tombstone teeth.

If you have nicer teeth, you might smile more, and thus be happier. Scientific American says that by consciously smiling, we trigger a psychological feedback mechanism that causes us to be happy. When you’re not smiling, it may be because you are unhappy with your teeth. For example, they may be crooked enough to make you self-conscious. It’s very hard to smile when doing so makes you self-conscious about your teeth-every single time. By avoiding smiling, you are dampening your own potential for spontaneous happiness!

Record yourself sleeping. Do you grind your teeth in your sleep? If so, get a mouth guard.

It’s a giant, giant problem. If a person’s nose works properly, and your breath is rank, they will be very likely to stay as far away from you as necessary to make the terrible smell stop assaulting their senses. And sadly, since they know it will likely bother you personally to hear about your breath smelling, or for some other reason, they see profit in not letting you know about it. You literally won’t know about it, because it’s something that’s very hard for you to detect personally. So really you need to every once in a while blow in someone else’s face and ask them to check for you. Teamwork for the win.

How do you use this thing called your body?

In the winter if your skin is itchy, you should lotion up religiously. Who knew that? Many have never learned this beneficial task. You may think there’s something wrong because of itchy skin, but it’s likely just really dry. Lotion just might fix that. Everyone uses soap, but it’s a rather new human invention, and as much as we use it, we probably need to cancel out the wiping out of our natural oils with some lotions.

In case you’re curious why you have butt hair, it’s a lubricant, and stops chafing. Notice you get furry on those places where there is rubbing, and if you didn’t have fur there, you may sustain injury.

Peripheral vision appears to be much faster in some measurements, and the science also points towards this. This seems like a pretty great idea from an evolutionary advantage perspective, because it’s more important for you to become aware of threats and opportunities that aren’t already on your radar, more so than it is perhaps to deal with what you are already aware of. Many wonder why they’re mutually exclusive. Does this same pattern of recognition speed differential exist in other species? Do those species use it for more offense or defense?

Your left and right eyes may see color ever so differently. One of them may have a slightly warmer tone with a little shift to red, and the other eye could be slightly cooler with a shift to the blue. Test it out yourself. Cover one eye, look at a colorful photo or scene. Now put your hand over the other, go back and forth real fast, do you see a difference in the color tone? If you’re lucky enough to have the same perception in both eyes, you still definitely don’t see colors the same as other people! For instance, we’ve discovered that some percentage of us, particularly women, can see a vastly wider array of colors.

A Stanford researcher states that what spectrum of wavelengths one person is taught to be a color might differ from someone else’s perception of what wavelengths constitute that color. That is, a color between red and yellow somewhere might be seen and remembered as red for some and orange for others. This is interesting, especially, when it comes to memory in the way that if you and a friend sees a car that you see as something in between of red and orange, he may see as red. He will have a higher chance of remembering what the color of the car was when asked later.

This is also relevant to pattern recognition of language both vocal and written: Jesus’s face imprinted into toast, your grandma’s face, and Jennifer Aniston among other things, and goes hand in hand with evolutionary theory in the way that recognizing the pattern of a predator in the bushes is advantageous.

Robert Sapolsky touches upon this subject in his human behavioral biology lectures. Scivive highly recommends giving the introduction video a try, or reading his book Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. The book is a guide to stress, stress-related diseases, and coping.

In June 2012, after 20 years of study of women with four cones (non-functional tetrachromats), neuroscientist Dr. Gabriele Jordan identified a woman (subject cDa29) who was able to detect a greater variety of colors than trichromatic ones. According to estimates, she can see an incredible 99 million more colors than the rest of us, and the scientists think she’s one of a very few number of people with super-vision, which they call “tetrachromats.”

The lens blocks UV light (which would otherwise be visible) so people with artificial lenses (or no lenses at all) will see the world in different colors. It’s theorized that Monet painted blue paintings for that reason.

Not every part of your eye works the same. Not even close. Your eyes have two principle types of light detectors. Cones are active at higher light levels (photopic vision), are capable of color vision, and are responsible for high spatial acuity. The central fovea (the center of your vision) is populated exclusively by cones. Rods are responsible for vision at low light levels (scotopic vision). They do not mediate color vision, and have a low spatial acuity. They are more common on the periphery.

It’s pitch black dark out. You’ve got much more color sensing in the center of your eye, and much more light detection with the rods, which can’t see color, on the edges of your eye. It changes the way your eye responds to peripheral activity. You can respond to threats coming in your field of vision quicker. It also means that if it’s dark out, you could sometimes see things better. By changing the part of your eye that is seeing them, you might end up moving your head around or moving your eyes around. Seeing something better, even though you’re looking with the same eyes.

The Fletcher-Munson curves are one of many sets of equal-loudness contours for the human ear, determined experimentally by Harvey Fletcher and Wilden A. Munson in the 1930s. 

Even if you account for Fletcher-Munson curves, they probably had wide variance when they generated it, and you don’t know what has happened from injuries or concerts, or car stereo, or headphones. The abuse you’ve given your ears effects what you can hear. Unless everyone in the world is mastering at the same volume in dB, there’s no hope they’re hearing even close to the same thing.

Some wonder if Fletcher-Munson curves exist for eyes. Would be nice if movies played a quick test image or two, so you could know if what you were seeing was what they wanted you to see. This is what they do in the television and broadcast world. The old Indian and other test patterns.

One can often see people bending over to look at their laptop, crimped over like chimps looking at a banana on the ground. Why is it that the man should serve the laptop instead of standing strong and having good posture and letting the laptop serve you? Move it, don’t move yourself.

Runners should have a weight distribution sensor in their shoes to warn them when they’re doing harm to themselves through imbalance or bad form. You can see some evidence of this after some time by looking at how the soles of your shoes have worn unevenly.

Scivive likes the fishman idea where you work from a swimming pool, that’s got to ease up some back pain I’d think.

It’s funny how much one inch of muscle around a human body gets respect. It’s because that one inch used to be the difference between winning and losing in conflict.

We wouldn’t give as much thought to one inch more or less on an elephant. That’s because it wouldn’t make any difference, there’s already so many inches.

It’s also funny how hard it is to put that inch there, or cut fat out. One single little inch. The amount of work that it takes to put an inch or two of muscle on your bicep or your neck is hundreds of hours, over months. The amount of respect those couple inches gets you with reasonable men is also pretty large. It’s funny to think that only millimeters of difference lets you tell the difference between one human’s face and another. An inch here or there on another person’s body will cause you to feel fear or lust so easily.

You see, we care so much about those few inches, because for women, it might mean having enough calories to handle another life growing inside them. It might also mean not getting demolished physically if you piss off the wrong guy. We care about those inches, but these days with jujitsu, mace, and firearms, we haven’t evolved the ability to detect and honor those force multipliers. At least not in the same way we have the obvious physical traits that have been around tens of thousands of years.

The tools and tactics we have developed over time and spread throughout our populations makes us vastly more effective in all the things we choose to do, both good and evil. A tool is a force multiplier. As is the gear, the wheel and so on. You used to get a little out of what you put in, now you get a lot more. Take for instance, the firearm. You move your finger quarter of inch over here, and that guy over there dies.

You press your foot one inch down on the accelerator, now you’re going a hundred miles per hour in your car. You move your foot one inch off the gas, and eventually you’re coming to a stop.

Being strong is better than being fast.

Running analogy vs. facing your problems and powerlifting. There is a weakness in running from your problems instead of getting stronger and facing your problems.

Over two thousand years ago, Socrates said, “No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.”

Whole body movements are more useful in the real world.

Do big compound exercises at high weight and low repetitions. This way you’re getting the most strength and muscle growth out of the least amount of time. Best bang for buck, if you will. Some would say you’re getting the most strength, period. Some prefer to be learning or doing almost anything else than lifting weights for vanity. Such is the competitive life we live. But if you want a quality mate, you want to be doing some lifting. How else can they tell you’re better than the rest if the rest look sexier than you?

If you’re going to be sitting watching television, or writing a book, or lazily enjoying the Internet, you might as well be pedaling your feet while you are doing it. After a while, it’s natural and you feel like doing it. Best part, you can eat more of what you like, and be more fit, with limited cost. The downside is that you’re going to sweat a bit, so you’re going to need to shower a little more than normal. Some people build an exercise bike and gaming computer station combo. You can buy standup desks, and add-ons that let you attach your laptop to a bicycle.

If you need to move around for fitness anyway, you could try learning a skill while you’re doing it. Fighting, dancing, a sport. While the gains you make in fitness can be eaten away by the passage of time and laziness, the skills gained stay for a lifetime.

If you go to a gym rat who’s huge, he might know how to work out well, or he might not. How big he is has nothing to do with what he knows. It has to do with how long he has been in the gym, and so the people who get the biggest are not always the smartest.

People who get the most results in the gym are the ones who have done it the longest. You are as fit as you have been recently working out consistently.

As soon as you stop working out consistently, for a period of time, whatever fitness you had disappears quickly. This is why I like weight loss better than fitness, because when you lose weight, that burdening weight stays lost. When you lift weights and get stronger, maybe you get a little muscle memory, maybe it comes back a little quicker.

You have to look at drug sales, assuming they’re not lying about the numbers. Which they probably aren’t. Companies are required by law to be truthful and all, if they’re a public company.

Who’s taking all these steroids? Truckloads of them are being sold. Somebody’s taking them. Well, some would say that the people who are the most gigantic are taking them. They could assume the same thing for any type of other performance enhancing substances.

Some studies show that taking steroids adds more performance than lifting weights, by a factor of like maybe fifty percent more, or double. By taking steroids you put on more muscle mass than you will by actually lifting weights. If that’s the case, then might you save yourself the time, unless you really need to learn the physical exertive of skills of being able to actually lift heavy stuff?

You never intend to lift heavy items anyway. You’re doing it just for looks. Might not the time saving of some steroids outperform actual weight lifting? And then you’ve got the thing that when you’re in the store and you see some guy who’s obviously jacked on steroids and just drinking coffee and protein. Do you want to live that lifestyle? Even if you did, how are you going to get there without the steroids?

Let’s say that guy on water, chicken, and steroids is up against you, on working out. You’re getting crushed by double. You aren’t going to ever be able to make it up. I don’t see any other way in today’s environment, since everyone decided to hop on the illegal drug freight train. Should you not go that route, if that’s your goal? If everyone else decides that they’re going to work for free and you decide you want to keep charging. I don’t see how you’ll win that battle.

Think about how useful weight training is. There’s still things you can’t train. Let’s say you want to grab a rusted bolt and unscrew it, your hands won’t be strong enough, no matter what. You still need a screwdriver. Still need pliers for leverage.

Some fat dudes look stronger than they really are. Work on the muscles people see, and look strong. Fat distribution on your arms can make you look stronger, or on your legs make you go slower (or arms.)

The 40% Rule is a concept used by Navy SEALs to increase mental toughness. The story was told by Jesse Itzler in his audiobook, Living with a SEAL: 31 Days Training with the Toughest Man on the Planet.

Itzler wrote about his houseguest, “He would say that when your mind is telling you you’re done, you’re really only 40 percent done. And he had a motto: If it doesn’t suck we don’t do it. And that was his way of forcing us to get uncomfortable to figure out what our baseline was and what our comfort level was and just turning it upside-down.”

One way of thinking about the 40% rule is to “train till failure.” When you reach that point of exhaustion during a run or pushing weights, when you usually would stop, keep running for one more minute or complete another rep with your weight training. You’ll be surprised to see how much further you can push yourself.

But be sure to do this safely. Injuring yourself is counterproductive.

Gets your lungs to understand they need to be larger, because if you never reach their limits, why would they get bigger? It’s the equivalent of having a freer flowing air system in your car’s engine, free peak horsepower. Everything after you’ve warmed up seems easier, and it seems to let you hold a higher heart rate for longer, which means you burn more calories.

Honor the tough workouts. The less you want to do it, the better. What if you can’t hit the same numbers you’re used to hitting? That’s great, you’re pushing the limit, so just back off the weight a bit, or a whole lot. Unless you’re injured, you should still try to keep up the habits, even if you have to go in and pretend to do the lift. Whatever it takes to maintain the habit. The habit is worth 100 times what the lift is worth. Maintain your good habits!

If you want to be warmer, work harder. It helps you not have the drops in performance where you don’t notice you’re slacking, the cold reminds you that you are slacking. Be careful, working out in the cold can have negative impacts if you push too hard.

If you know how to dance, you know that your moves stop and start at multiples of the beat, thus if you want to hit a certain speed on a cardio machine, it can help to have music that hits the same beat naturally that you’re trying to hit. If you want to hit 80 rpm on the bike, 160 bpm would sync each extension of your leg with a tick of the rhythm. If you enjoy dance, and exercise, I would have to imagine that the dance instinct would modify your exercise behavior by going faster for faster songs within reason. You can find pre-made playlists to fit different paces and beats per minute.

If you’re a dangerous microbe, you need your host to transmit you to new victims before the host dies. Once the host dies, the likelihood of transmission goes way down. It goes the same for the common cold and flu. Those germs need you to shake hands and sneeze near other people before they can tell you’re sick, so that they can’t avoid you. Thus germs and diseases have a profit in infecting you and being communicable before they’re detectable, so people can’t avoid them. Therefore, don’t shake hands with people more than you need to unless you’re ok with the risk of getting sick. There’s a fine line between having enough germs around to have a healthy immune system, and getting sick more than needed.

Touch your eyes and mouth with a different hand than you touch door handles. Open and close doors with your forearms or elbows if you can, so you don’t get unnecessary germs on your hands.

In an area with COVID-19, wear your mask and wash your hands. Wearing a mask costs you nothing and could save your life.

Everyone’s got something wrong with them. Become your own expert.

When you have something uncommon and weird happen with your body, and you take the issue to your doctor, that professional is going to end up Googling it just like you would, because the number of things that can go wrong with you will always be much larger than the number of things any single doctor had time to study, regardless of dedication. We’re just so complex that the only hope we have to fix each other is to specialize. Now what are the chances that the first doctor you visit just happens to be an expert in the field that you need?

Do you know what happens to alternative medicine that is shown to work? It just becomes normal medicine. Just like aspirin, which is based on willow tree bark, and has been known to relieve pain for a few thousand years.

Things that don’t actually work get to stay “alternative.”

Steve Jobs thought he could cure his cancer with fruit instead of surgery. It didn’t work.

Farrah Fawcett refused surgery and took alternative treatment in Germany even as her anal cancer spread to her liver and killed her.

Bob Marley refused surgery and died from the spread of melanoma from a toe to his lungs and brain. His final words to his son Ziggy were, “Money can’t buy life.” No, but prompt, scientific medical treatment could have.

Sadly, it’s easier to trick someone than it is to convince them they’ve been tricked, so the number of people that can’t be shaken free of silly, stupid, harmful ideas is just too damn large.

Don’t screw with the complex system that is your body.

What you learn about complex systems is that they’re hard to control. When you try and edit a complex system with self-regulating behaviors, you can’t just change one thing. You have to change another thing that helps edit the response to thing that you changed. That cascading waterfall effect of all the different things you didn’t know you’re supposed to be measuring or you didn’t notice changed leads to the wrong outcomes that you didn’t want.

A good argument for human beings as the most complicated thing we’re aware of in the world is by defining complexity as the number of components a thing has. The number of variables. That is the number of self-modifying things that make understanding much harder. Because what you understood in the beginning, as soon as you attempt to make a change, it changes itself in response in a way that almost seems conscious. Like a conscious actor.

You’re at risk from trying to make modifications to that complicated system. It’s probably larger than you know, and probably larger than you’ll ever actually be able to know, until we discover a great deal more about how the body works. And it goes the same way for any complex system. Medicines, in particular, are a good example. If you can avoid taking medicines that you don’t need, then you also get to avoid discovering how those medicines were actually misunderstood. Don’t let drug companies discover their drugs’ safety on you. When would you be willing to take more risks? Well, if you’re trying to avoid the uncertain negative outcome that you don’t know could happen, but you don’t want to find out either, that’s the one thing you’re measuring.

Fear of uncertainty. Accurate fear, proper fear. Fear works—that’s why it’s still around. It’s very effective. Fear is quite good when used properly. If you already know that a separate terrible thing is coming for you, and is more certain, well then it’s a good trade.

In life, your body is a self-correcting, self-regulating, basically conscious actor. I’m stretching the use of the word “conscious,” but it has its own agenda whether it’s conscious of it or not, and it wants you to do things a certain way, especially when you decide that you’re going to fight about an issue. Like, “Hey, body, I want you to have less body fat.” Or, “Hey, body, I want you to feel high. I want you to feel connected to the world, and have hallucinating trails that you see, and I want your heart rate to be really fast and like feel feelings of euphoria ecstasy.” When you want those things from your body, your body doesn’t want those things. Your body will respond to those chemicals that it doesn’t want there by locking up the receptor they’re trying to bind to with other things, or by becoming tolerant, not through some type of balancing behavior of its own, but through just some other mechanism.

Maybe your body doesn’t need to fight against what you’re doing because some other thing fights against what you’re doing anyway. Take light, for example. If you look at bright light, if you look out your window it’s bright out there; and then when you look back inside it takes time for your eyes to readjust to that other level of light. Now is that a side effect of your body trying to do a specific thing? In this case your body is trying to help you have a better view of the world, so your body’s doing its best to help you. But it’s the reality that’s holding you back. It’s the reality of the mechanical biological framework of how your eyes operate.

They just can’t see that much dynamic range of seeing in that brightness without having to lock your iris closed, and seeing in that darkness without having to open your iris up. The photo receptors we have aren’t as amazing as they could be. We have to do this other external opening and closing thing to make up for their weakness.

Even in places where your body’s doing its best to help you get what you want instead of not, you have to account for the fact that a behavior is going to change over time. The response that you get is going to change over time, and there should be a minimum effective dose. There should be diminishing returns. And then there should be an overdoing it. If you’re not aware of those three data points then it’s going to be very hard for you to have a relationship with any behavior.

Whether that’s gambling or gaming or singing or doing drugs, you need to know the minimum, the maximum, and the normal. Are you genetically predisposed to have a psychological problem? Maybe LSD is not for you. Genetically predisposed with a heart valve to factor arrhythmia, the irregularity of the way your heart operates, where you take a stimulant and now your body works super long.

If you know that you’re going to have a heart attack because your HDL/LDL profile is so screwed up, and there’s so much cholesterol in your blood that your arteries are just clogging up quicker than they should be, well then you go, “Oh, you know, I’m fat; this is probably a good idea.” Because yeah, maybe it screwed something else up, but that’s a good trade for knowing that it helps this one thing that you know you’re going to have a problem with soon, right? If you have mental illness and your option is guaranteed crazy, or this other medicine that might make you shake and pee yourself but you’re no longer crazy, shaking and peeing yourself is probably a good deal. Right?

Don’t take an absolutist view in regards to taking medicine that works. Do take an absolutist view if you take medicine that you need and only what you need, and be reasonable with what need means.

How many people know when they read a medicine label that says, “Do not operate heavy machinery while using this,” that heavy machinery actually means a car? Most people don’t realize that you’re not supposed to operate a car when you take a medicine that says, “don’t operate heavy machinery.” Now as far as Scivive is concerned, that’s bad user experience design.

Do you have a family history of psychosis? You shouldn’t be experimenting around with drugs. Do you have a family history of alcohol addiction? You might be predisposed to alcohol addiction, so maybe you don’t mess around as much with alcohol. Do you have a family addiction to gambling? Well, let’s either assume that hereditary doesn’t exist, which is obviously not true because it’s very likely that you look like your parents, or it’s very likely that you have some similar mannerisms to them. You might like the same foods at the same age that they did. If you look back at their history, you might find that when they were young, they liked the same foods that you like. Hereditary exists. Learn what hindered your family or was likely to, and avoid those pitfalls. It’s very easy to look up what contraindications are. It wouldn’t take more than two hours to know what you should be looking out for.

I still think it’s useful to compare and contrast repetitive / risky / highly rewarding behaviors, and the repetitive / risky / highly rewarded behaviors associated with taking drugs, because some drugs can give you a broad perspective of what actually takes place with any repetitive, risky, pleasurable behavior in life. A shorter, more “in your face” time frame offers the most vivid perspective as to the risks, upsides, and downsides of engaging with certain activities, behaviors, lifestyles, people, and emotions, and can provide valuable data that is useful for recognizing patterns in those arenas.

Pattern recognition is a necessary component of progress, and some drugs offer range detection as to where certain practices and behaviors might or will lead, not to mention the potential discoveries associated with inducing abrupt physiological change. One of the upsides to engaging with drugs can be good practice for mastering relationships and balance with risky behavior and high reward stimuli. Some may recognize the dangers of gambling after noticing a similar pattern with a previous experience. The goal is to pre-simulate the extremes in life in regards to what you input and practice so you that you can find a nice spot somewhere in the middle with the knowledge of how bad and how good certain things can be. Minimum effective dose is the aim, and diminishing returns is the undesired outcome. It is incredibly useful to cultivate the ideal relationship with the things that introduce change so quickly.

Not all drugs are extremely addictive. Some you just enjoy the outcome and not necessarily the feeling. Drugs come in a lot of different flavors of effects and outcomes, similar to behaviors that affect your state. Some drugs can cause psychological dependence, some lifestyle choices (i.e., religion). Some drugs can cause physical dependence, and the same can be true with other substances and behaviors in your life.

Some drugs have an empowering affect that allows the user to distinguish the difference between external and internal stimulus, illuminating a path to proactive behavior as opposed to reactive behavior. A radical change in physiology is the fastest way to change your state, and rapid state change allows you to identify self-limitations, or fears, or pain points so you can modify the meaning and belief to reinforce better ones.

In summary, it’s useful to know where certain behaviors might lead you without actually engaging in a lifetime of them, and drugs are one of the viable tools for this. If it is true there are substance that can show you what would normally take years of repetition and focus in one evening, the upside is tremendous; but of course, everything comes at a price. Drugs are not the safest tools. However, some would argue that the statistics are misrepresenting of the actual substances’ danger, but rather the lack of knowledge on usage and recklessness from its users (which applies to every tool wielded by a fool). One might assume that everyone with a driver’s license is aware of the possible dangers of the act of driving alone, but do not discard the utility value. It is Scivive’s hope to see a similar attitude with drugs and their potential.

The data in your DNA, which starts in a single cell, and divides and divides until you are composed of billions of cells—that data, every once in a while, also lets something else live in you. Something that isn’t you, and that life kills you, and itself, at the same time. That’s what cancer usually is.

One of your cells ended up with a bad blueprint from perhaps some bad luck while copying, or a virus, or some radiation—you name it, there’s all kinds of ways to get a bad blueprint. Now usually when that blueprint goes wrong, your immune system notices, and gets rid of the whole cell with the problem, and you never notice it happened. But sometimes your white blood cells can’t tell that this cell is no longer following the blueprint that is you, and instead has its own ideas. It wants to copy and grow when it shouldn’t. Now you’re in a fight for your life against other life, which used to be on your team, but now it’s on its own team, and if it wins, you both lose. An odd thing life is sometimes.

They call this life in you, that’s no longer following orders, cancer.

Don’t encourage cancer by harming yourself.

When fighting cancer, one of the first and easiest things to do is to stop making your cells’ lives harder than they need to be. This way they don’t’ need to be so active, and then you end up with fewer copy errors, because they didn’t have to copy as often. For instance, when you smoke cigarettes, you’re literally dumping chemicals that don’t belong into one of your most vital organs. Smoke, tar, and all kinds of other things that aren’t the oxygen you need to survive.

Your lungs do the best they can to clean up the mess, and try as they might, they still can’t win the battle over time. You may have seen the lungs of a person who’s died and used to be a smoker. No matter how far back in the past they might have quit smoking, the scars and visible signs off their previous bad habit still remain. Not only do you have reduced lung capacity and less fitness the whole time you’re alive, you also have to pay the price for making all those extra cells do all that cleaning, because those cells had to do so much extra work they otherwise wouldn’t have done, now you are much, much more likely to get cancer. How much more likely? 15-30 times.

When drinking, account for your diminished capacity.

Only cross streets when it’s safer than normal. Take less risk. Do less stuff that might result in injury.

Drinking alcohol is a loan against the future that you must pay back with interest.

When you drink too much, you usually pay for that fun endeavor with hours of hangover the next day, and depending on how many laws you broke, possibly a number of following days.

The safety position: Use the safety position of being turned on your side when you’re passed out drunk or knocked out, so that if you throw up you don’t choke and die on your own vomit.

If inhaling junk that’s bad for you —like smoke and tar, asbestos and nanoparticles, and paint and fiberglass—is bad for your lungs, because they have to go in there and clear all those things out, if they’re even able to; well then, your liver has a long list of compounds that it now has to clear out as well. Your liver’s job is basically to keep your blood clear of impurities, and what your liver thinks are impurities is often times what people wish it didn’t.

For example, when you drink alcohol, and you want to feel a buzz, you have to first drink enough to overcome your liver’s ability to keep it out of your blood, and drink enough to overcome the blood-brain barrier, which tries to keep useless stuff that doesn’t belong in your brain out of your brain. So your liver is doing its job. It’s trying to make sure everything works great, so you don’t die to some stupid thing you might have eaten. It takes the hit for the rest of your body and sacrifices some of itself so that every other part of your body can keep kicking ass. Your liver is a true sacrificial teammate of chemical compounds, the original, ultimate Scivivalist.

So what do we do? Because we all (to some degree) desire changes of mental state, and we’ve found a shortcut to state change by getting the drugs from outside and putting them in, instead of relying on joy and excitement and adventure and fear to generate those drugs internally for ourselves, as our bodies are great at doing! So the emotional systems and internal drug system (endocrine system) make better versions of much of the drugs we try to get outside and put in. Well, there are good reasons for those systems, and the behaviors that cause them to execute their rewards when they do; and they get screwed over and can’t do their jobs properly anymore. Why go out into the real world and explore, when you can trick yourself into thinking you are by taking a pill, or journeying into a book? You don’t have to do things in the real world to get what you used to have, back when these systems evolved a really, really long time ago.

Many people now decide to take the shortcut, and their organs pay the price. So while we feel “lucky” enough to still have crummy shortcuts, our livers recognize them as chemical refuse, and try get rid of them! You might want to get a buzz, and your liver is literally working against that goal. Stop having an internal battle with your own organs! Go outside and enjoy nature, adventure, love, sport, success, and excitement, and you may feel the greatest buzz you’ve ever encountered.

Does gravity give us sagging boobs and longer penises? This is some definite theory crafting. So they theorize—at least some people have—that human females have grown bigger boobs just as a signaling strategy. Maybe, or maybe physics and gravity matters. If you have to feed the kids, and you don’t have to hold them as high on your body, then if you drop them, they don’t drop from the same height.

Wouldn’t it make sense that if you went from being a non-erect animal to an upstanding erect animal, to take advantage of some of the things that geometry already had worked out for due to their proximity to the earth, and not having as much travel distance? Maybe, evolution would try and naturally elongate some of the body parts to find their way back down to solid ground. It is interesting enough—the discovery that if you go from a crouched animal to an upright animal, some of your parts may have worked better down closer to the ground, and so they might end up returning there over time.

It wouldn’t be surprising if people’s eyes were actually developing divergent color and perception properties so they could combine into a more rounded whole. Perhaps this is why we appear to have handedness, and use left eyebrow for emotion. As there is cooperation in the world by dividing roles, so may there be in the human body. We know your gut bacteria is always at battle, anytime there’s life and a limited food supply you’re going to see competition for it. That’s not to say that your vision is life requiring food, but your ability to see threat and avoid becoming food yourself is how such a division of labor between left and right could have evolved far back in evolutionary history.

It is funny how many things are the result of being selected for. Dogs have ears that stick up and can be aimed so they can not only hear better, but choose the direction they hear most well. As humans we don’t have the ability to point our ears or separate from our head position; nor can we hear the same range of sounds that dogs do; nor do we have anywhere near as powerful a sense of smell, though we do have tons better vision and vocalization. Therefore we’re able to operate more cunningly in groups, even more cunningly then the famed teamwork of a pack of wolves

Because heredity exists, and because we can control which dogs get to breed with other dogs, we’ve been able to create dogs over time to have the traits we choose. We have done the same with nearly all the vegetables and fruits you eat today, and many of these things literally didn’t exist in forms you would recognize 1,000 years ago.

It’s not just happening with living things, it’s happening with nonliving ideas as well. Since the advent of writing, we’ve been able to keep a reliable record of knowledge through generations of humans being born and dying, over and over. The people come and go, but the ideas keep on going. There’s some tragic loss of ideas which haven’t been written, or haven’t been digitized and spread far enough, or were purposefully destroyed by conquering groups and nation-states. One such event was the ancient library of Alexandria, where countless treasures of the past were permanently lost. At least now we’re smart enough to have geographic redundancy and keep the copies on different mediums, so that even if there’s a giant electromagnetic pulse from nuclear war, or giant solar flares that wipe out much of the electronics we have today, we’ll still have copies that are optical instead of magnetic or electrical.