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This month, I’ve been reading a book called Eat For Life by Dr. Joel Fuhrman. This book covers his nutrient-rich program for longevity, disease reversal and sustained weight loss that revolves around a whole foods plant-based diet. While reading this book, I came across a fascinating chart that Dr. Fuhrman had developed. This chart listed over 150 different foods and assigned them a Nutrient IQ score. What is a Nutrient IQ score? Apparently, it’s a score that resembles the amount of nutrients within a food based upon serving size. For example, a nutrient-dense food like a 1/4 cup of Red Pepper receives a score of 60 while a nutrient-lacking food like 2oz of Cheese receives a 2. This scoring system piqued my interest as it’s meant to help track the quality of one’s diet. And since I’m continually looking to improve my nutrition, I took this opportunity… Read More

Two months ago, I wrote a post describing how I planned to Thrive Through A Pandemic and Recession. Despite all the uncertainty and fear that came with the coronavirus spreading throughout the world, and the anxiety that came with the economy shutting down throughout the United States, I felt it was possible to look at this situation as an opportunity for growth. As hard as that may seem in such a difficult time, I’ve done my best to embody that mindset over the past couple months. During that time, I’ve been able to progress in a number of areas but struggled with one in particular. In this post, I’ll detail how I’ve spent my time during the pandemic in an effort to grow and thrive. In the fitness space, the first thing I focused on during the pandemic was to create a full-body fitness program which doesn’t require weights, resistance bands or equipment since gyms… Read More

My 3-Step Guide to Cognitive Health was recently posted on my website. This guide details the 3 most important actions you can take to develop and maintain a fit, sharp and accurate brain. Two of the steps within that guide include staying in contact with your social network and challenging your brain with difficult tasks. With a quarantine in effect because of the current pandemic, my family and I have scheduled weekly family game nights to both stay connected and challenge our brains. It’s been a blast having my mom, dad, two sisters, brother and girlfriend all competing against each other online at once. So fun, I thought I’d share the three games we’ve recently played to stay cognitively fit. I don’t know the official name of this game, but we called it Lies. First, we split up into three teams of two to start. Two teams would play against each other… Read More

My girlfriend and I spent the past two weeks completing a personal finance course called Financial Peace University. This course is put on by Dave Ramsey, one of the most well-known personal finance experts. It was a course that included 9 one-hour lessons, each with their own homework assignments and takeaways. Since my girlfriend and I were raised quite differently in regards to money, we’ve often struggled to talk about it. She characterizes her feelings about money with words like greed, ego and shame while I often use words like freedom, opportunity and options. With these two differing mindsets, we thought it’d be useful to go through a course together that would provide us with a common background of knowledge on the topic. After completing the course, there’s a lot we both learned and found beneficial but there were a few items in Dave’s courses… Read More

If I were forced to list the most prominent challenge I’ve faced throughout my life, it’s most likely loneliness. The feeling that I don’t have any close friends who share common interests, goals or mindsets with me. Now I understand everyone is incredibly unique and I’ve forced the problem onto myself but my combination of less popular preferences and prioritizes have made it difficult. Preferring exercise over video games, documentaries over movies and healthy restaurants over bars isn’t popular. Prioritizing my workout sessions over happy hours, education over friends and work over social gatherings hasn’t left me many opportunities for developing a strong social network. I have done this to myself but what I’ve realized while combing through tons of research on brain health is that social health, very well could be the strongest influence… Read More

In the United States and many other developed nations, it’s cool to be busy. It’s almost become a competition for people to be as busy as possible. But for us to be so busy, the first thing we tend to cut back on for time is sleep. And most of us are happy and proud to sleep less and even boast to others how much we’re accomplishing because we’re only sleeping 4 or 5 hours a night. The problem with this is that it’s a self-perpetuating cycle. When we sleep less, we become less productive. When we become less productive, we accumulate more work that needs to be completed. When there’s more work to be completed, we cut back on sleep again to work more hours. And in turn, we become even less productive. In this post, I’m going to detail the effects of sleeping less on productivity and how you can avoid the self-perpetuating cycle. Most of us start cutting back on sleep when… Read More

A few weeks ago, I proposed a question: Is Your Brainware Out-of-Date? This post talked about the importance of learning. Not only keeping your realm of knowledge up-to-date, but dedicating time to learn completely new skills. But, even if your brainware is up-to-date, it’s still completely possible for it to be running slow. You might notice that as some very knowledgeable people age, it can still become harder for them to process new information or communicate already known information. This decline of cognition tends to happen as we age but it doesn’t necessarily have to. By challenging our brain and forcing it to process information faster than it needs to, it’s entirely possible to strengthen and quicken our cognitive abilities just as push-ups strengthen our muscles. In this post… Read More

I’ve been writing blog posts on myHealthSciences.com for just about a year now. In that time, I’ve published over 50 posts on fitness, nutrition, sleep, cognitive health, financial independence and minimalism. All of this to share the things that have helped me to become healthier and happier. But, what I’ve found is that even though the blog is a great resource for information, it’s also just a stream of conscience. Each week I write about one of the six core topics that’s been at the top of my mind but there isn’t any sort of organization or hierarchy of importance from post-to-post. What this means is that people commonly ask me, “how do I get started with nutrition?”. Or, “What matters most in regards to sleep?”. Or, “Where should I put my extra cash on-hand?”. And, my response is usually that the answer is on my website somewhere… Read More

The average person in the United States walks about 6,000 steps per day and has a high risk for heart disease and mortality. The people in Tsimane, a small village in Bolivia, walk about 17,000 steps per day and are known for their extremely low risk of heart disease and mortality. This correlation between physical activity (steps) and risk of heart disease or mortality has been cited a number of times in scientific literature. Therefore, we’re confident that being active helps produce a healthy lifestyle. But, with the current coronavirus lock-down measures in place, most of us are confined to our own homes all day. I’ve noticed my average steps per day declining to around 5,000 per day when I workout and 3,000 per day on rest days. This is far less than the 25,000 steps I average on a typical workday… Read More