Blog

A few weekends ago, I spent the day observing and following the nutritional habits of the healthiest type 1 diabetic I know. I made and ate every meal he did at the exact time he had scheduled. And what I saw and learned defied many popular beliefs about the nutritional needs of a diabetic. Like that diabetics should avoid carbohydrates because they raise blood sugar levels, right? Well, 62% of his calories consumed turned out to be carbs. He didn’t seem to be avoiding them but searching for them. And diabetics should avoid fruit because the high sugar concentration causes spikes in blood sugar levels, right? Well, he had fruit at every meal, nearly ten servings of fruit for the day, and one breakfast dish containing four servings of fruit alone. He wasn’t avoiding these either. In fact, these high-carb, high-fruit, and plant-based… Read More

Ever since watching Jim Cramer’s TV show Mad Money in high school, I’ve had an interest in investing. He always talked about how to evaluate the stock market, how to tell when it’s a bull vs bear market, and when to buy/sell. This was super interesting to me and when I finally got my first job after college, I opened a Roth IRA (individual retirement account) and started investing. I picked a handful of diversified stocks and bought when Jim indicated it was an appropriate time. This worked well but over the years, as I learned more about investing, I realized there was a better strategy. Instead of stressing about when I should buy or sell stocks, I found a strategy that helped me automate the process and alleviate the stress. And instead of spending hours each month researching the best time to buy and sell, I found an effortless strategy… Read More

In my pursuit of optimal nutrition over the past ten to fifteen years, I’ve experimented with a few different supplements but have never really bought into the hype. I have seen many of my friends tout protein, multivitamins, and fish oil. And I’ve seen advertisements and media covering mega dosing vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants. For the most part, I ignored my friends’ supplement routines and the media advertisements. Until now, when I decided to take a deep dive into supplements and explore if any supplements were worth taking. Here’s what I found. According to a study in 2019, Theoretical Food and Nutrient Composition of Whole-Food Plant-Based and Vegan Diets Compared to Current Dietary Recommendations, almost all vitamins and minerals can be consumed by eating a variety of plant-based whole foods like vegetables, fruits… Read More

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