Drop Dead Healthy Read online

  Drop Dead Healthy

  A. J. Jacobs

  From the bestselling author of The Year of Living Biblicallyand The Know-It-All comes the true and truly hilarious story of one person’s quest to become the healthiest man in the world.

  Hospitalized with a freak case of tropical pneumonia, goaded by his wife telling him, “I don’t want to be a widow at forty-five,” and ashamed of a middle-aged body best described as “a python that swallowed a goat,” A.J. Jacobs felt compelled to change his ways and get healthy. And he didn’t want only to lose weight, or finish a triathlon, or lower his cholesterol. His ambitions were far greater: maximal health from head to toe.

  The task was epic. He consulted an army of experts—sleep consultants and sex clinicians, nutritionists and dermatologists. He subjected himself to dozens of different workouts—from Strollercize classes to Finger Fitness sessions, from bouldering with cavemen to a treadmill desk. And he took in a cartload of diets: raw foods, veganism, high protein, calorie restriction, extreme chewing, and dozens more. He bought gadgets and helmets, earphones and juicers. He poked and he pinched. He counted and he measured.

  The story of his transformation is not only brilliantly entertaining, but it just may be the healthiest book ever written. It will make you laugh until your sides split and endorphins flood your bloodstream. It will alter the contours of your brain, imprinting you with better habits of hygiene and diet. It will move you emotionally and get you moving physically in surprising ways. And it will give you occasion to reflect on the body’s many mysteries and the ultimate pursuit of health: a well-lived life.

  Praise for Drop Dead Healthy

  “I couldn’t wait to get my hands on this book, and once again, the brilliant A.J. Jacobs had me laughing out loud—and also deciding to change the way I live. Drop Dead Healthy is a rare mixture of the hilarious, the absurd, and the scientifically sound. Who knew it could be so entertaining to read about broccoli puree and shoeless jogging?”

  — GRETCHEN RUBIN, author of THE HAPPINESS PROJECT

  “We can become healthier by learning from A.J.’s discomfort in this very funny book. He moves us from theory to practice by dragging his body through all the longevity practices.”

  — DR. MEHMET OZ, host, THE DR. OZ SHOW

  “A.J. Jacobs is very, very bad for your health. He will keep you up reading ’til 2 a.m., disturbing your circadian rhythms, making you sleep through breakfast and overeat at lunch. He is delicious. He’s habit-forming. He will give you infectious titters and terminal glee. Don’t let that stop you. Indulge.”

  —MARY ROACH, author of BONK and PACKING FOR MARS

  “Who wouldn’t want to be fitter, happier, more productive? In this riotous, madcap book, A.J. Jacobs sets himself an ambitious goal: to become the person we all wish we could be. It’s vintage A.J. Do your future self a favor and read this book.”

  —JOSHUA FOER, author of MOONWALKING WITH EINSTEIN

  “Can one man go from a ‘python that ate a goat’ physique to perfect specimen? From Roman soldier workouts to areca palm plants, from the sublime to the absurd, A.J. has tried it all. I laughed my ass off the whole way and learned a ton . . . including about my ass.”

  —TIMOTHY FERRISS, author of THE 4-HOUR BODY

  A. J. JACOBS is the author of The New York Times bestsellers The Year of Living Biblically, My Life as an Experiment, and The Know-It-All. He has been called “inspired and inspiring” (Vanity Fair), “entertaining” (The New York Times), and “hilarious” (Time). He is the editor at large of Esquire magazine, a contributor to NPR, and has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Entertainment Weekly. He lives in New York City with his wife and kids. Visit him at AJJacobs.com and follow him on Twitter@ajjacobs.

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  COPYRIGHT © 2012 SIMON & SCHUSTER

  ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

  The Know-It-All

  The Year of Living Biblically

  My Life as an Experiment

  Simon & Schuster

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  Copyright © 2012 by A.J. Jacobs

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition April 2012

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  Designed by Ruth Lee-Mui

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Jacbs, A.J., 1968–

  Drop dead healthy : one man’s humble quest for bodily perfection / A. J. Jacobs.

  p. cm

  1. Jacobs, A.J., 1968– Health. 2. Health. 3. Nutrition—Biography. 4. Exercise. 5. Health—Humor. I. Title.

  RA776.5.J265 2012

  613.2092—dc23

  [B]

  2011039172

  ISBN 978-1-4165-9907-4

  ISBN 978-1-4391-1015-7 (ebook)

  To Julie and my sons

  Thank you for purchasing this Simon & Schuster eBook.

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  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1 The Stomach

  The Quest to Eat Right

  Chapter 2 The Heart

  The Quest to Get My Blood Pumping

  Chapter 3 The Ears

  The Quest for Quiet

  Chapter 4 The Butt

  The Quest to Avoid Sedentary Life

  Chapter 5 The Immune System

  The Quest to Conquer Germs

  Chapter 6 The Stomach, Revisited

  The Quest for the Perfect Meal

  Chapter 7 The Genitals

  The Quest to Have More Sex

  Chapter 8 The Nervous System

  The Quest to Hurt Less

  Chapter 9 The Lower Intestine

  The Quest to Go to the Bathroom Properly

  Chapter 10 The Adrenal Gland

  The Quest to Lower My Stress Level

  Chapter 11 The Brain

  The Quest to Be Smarter

  Chapter 12 The Endocrine System

  The Quest for a Nontoxic Home

  Chapter 13 The Teeth

  The Quest for the Perfect Smile

  Chapter 14 The Feet

  The Quest to Run Right

  Chapter 15 The Lungs

  The Quest to Breathe Better

  Chapter 16 The Stomach, Revisited

  The Continued Quest for the Perfect Diet

  Chapter 17 The Skin

  The Quest to Erase Blemishes

  Chapter 18 The Heart, Revisited

  The Quest for the Perfect Workout

  Chapter 19 The Inside of the Eyelid

  The Quest for the Perfect Night’s Sleep

  Chapter 20 The Bladder

  The Quest to Figure Out What to Drink

  Chapter 21 The Gonads

  The Quest to Get More Balls

  Chapter 22 The Nose

  The Quest
to Smell Better

  Chapter 23 The Hands

  The Quest for Magic Fingers

  Chapter 24 The Back

  The Quest to Stand Up Straight

  Chapter 25 The Eyes

  The Quest to See Better

  Chapter 26 The Skull

  The Quest to Not Be Killed in an Accident

  Chapter 27 The Finish Line

  Epilogue

  Appendix A Guerrilla Exercise

  Appendix B How to Eat Less

  Appendix C Five Tips on Treadmill Desks

  Appendix D My Five Foolproof (for Me, at Least) Methods of Stress Reduction

  Appendix E The Ten Best Pieces of Food Advice I’ve Gotten All Year

  Appendix F How to Live the Quiet Life

  Appendix G Five Toxins I Now Avoid

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  DROP DEAD HEALTHY

  Prologue

  FOR THE LAST FEW MONTHS, I’ve been assembling a list of things I need to do to improve my health. It’s an intimidatingly long list. Fifty-three pages. Here’s a sample:

  • Eat leafy green vegetables

  • Do forty minutes of aerobic exercise a day

  • Meditate several times a week

  • Watch baseball (lowers blood pressure, according to one study)

  • Nap (good for the brain and heart)

  • Hum (prevents sinus infections)

  • Win an Academy Award (A bit of a long shot, I know. But studies show Oscar winners live three years longer than non–Oscar winners.)

  • Keep my apartment at sixty-two degrees, which makes my body burn more calories a day

  • Buy a potted Areca palm plant (filters dirty air)

  • Lift weights to muscle exhaustion

  • Become an Okinawan woman (another long shot)

  And on and on.

  By the way, I’ve printed this list in nine-point Papyrus font, because I found a study that says hard-to-read fonts improve memorization.

  I want to do everything on my list because my quest isn’t just to be a little bit healthier. My quest isn’t to lose a couple of pounds. My quest is to turn my current self—a mushy, easily winded, moderately sickly blob—into the embodiment of health and fitness. To become as healthy as humanly possible.

  I’ve been intrigued by the topic of health and fitness for years. But the idea of devoting myself to the cause occurred to me during a recent vacation. It was supposed to be a relaxing week with the family in the Dominican Republic. Sand castles would be built. Boggle would be played. Soda would be ordered without ice.

  Instead, I ended up in a Caribbean hospital for three days with severe pneumonia. I expected some jet lag, maybe a skittish stomach. But tropical pneumonia? That took me by surprise.

  I’d read plenty about the importance of gratitude. So as I lay wheezing and shivering on my thin hospital mattress, I tried to find things to be thankful for. For instance, my hospital visit gave me the opportunity to learn new Spanish words such as “lung” and “pain” (pulmón and dolor, respectively). Also, roosters outside my hospital window woke me up every morning, which is marginally more charming than New York car alarms.

  Neither of these observations helped much. But I found one big upside, a life-altering one. This experience was a seventy-two-hour-long memento mori. For one of the few times in my life, I was certain I was about to leave this world. Now, maybe this fear was melodramatic, but in my defense: If you were hooked up to an IV drip with a rainbow of unknown liquids (clear, yellow, blue, pink), if you saw doctors speaking in hushed tones while stealing glances at you, if you couldn’t breathe without wincing, if your mind was fogged in by viruses, you might think what I did: The only way I’m getting out of here is on a stretcher covered by a sheet.

  My dread was more focused than any I’d ever experienced. Probably because of my three young sons. I want to be around to see them grow up. I want to be there for their graduations, their marriages, yes, but I also want to see them sing their first Led Zeppelin karaoke song and eat their first jalapeño pepper. I want to be around to teach them the importance of having compassion and why the original Willy Wonka is superior to the remake. I worked myself into quite a state by imagining all of the memories I’d never have.

  The thing is, I’m forty-one. I can no longer take my health for granted. Catching pneumonia is just one sign that I’m deteriorating. My bones are becoming lighter and more porous. My muscles are shriveling. My brain is shrinking, my arteries narrowing, my coordination slowing. I’m losing 1 percent of my testosterone a year.

  And I’m fat. Not morbidly obese. I’m what’s described as skinny fat. A python-that-swallowed-a-goat type of body. Which I’ve learned is the worst kind of fat. So-called visceral fat (which surrounds the liver and other vital organs) is considered much more dangerous than subcutaneous fat (the kind under the skin that causes cellulite). In fact, the size of your waistline is one of the best predictors of heart disease.

  My wife, Julie, has been nudging me for years about my growing belly. She’s got a repertoire. She’ll refer to me as Buddha. Or she’ll ask, “So, when are you due?” When she wants to be especially subtle, she’ll just whistle the Winnie-the-Pooh theme song as she walks by.

  She tells me she doesn’t care about whether or not I look fat. She says she just wants me to take care of myself so I’m around for a while. A couple of years ago, she sat me down at the dinner table, put her hands on mine, looked me in the eyes, and told me: “I don’t want to be a widow at forty-five.”

  “I understand,” I replied solemnly. I pledged to join a gym, and at the time, I meant it. But inertia is a powerful force.

  So I did nothing. I continued eating food packed with empty calories—lots of pasta and corn-syrupy cereal. There was a notable lack of anything green at my meals, not counting bottles of Rolling Rock. My exercise regimen was just as bad. I hadn’t done serious aerobic exercise since college. I got winded playing hide-and-seek with my sons.

  And then I found myself in the hospital gasping for air. And so, right about when the nurse came into my room bearing a pill the size of my middle toe, I made a pledge: If I make it out alive, my next project will be about revamping my body.

  I say “next project” because this book isn’t my first foray into radical self-improvement. Over the last decade, I’ve had a bit of a fixation. Studies show it’s healthy to have a purpose in life, and mine has been a relentless, well-intentioned if often misguided quest for perfection. Project Health will be the third leg of a triathlon devoted to upgrading my mind, my spirit, and my body.

  Some quick context: The mind was first. After college, away from research papers and seminars, I worried my brain was slowly turning to the consistency of Greek yogurt (which is on my list of foods to eat, incidentally). I could feel my IQ gently ebbing away. So I came up with a fix: I pledged to read the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica and learn everything I could. It was an extreme measure, sure, but not without family precedent. I got the idea for this quest from my father, who had started to read our Britannica set when I was a kid but only made it up to the letter B, around “Borneo” or “boomerang.” I wanted to finish what he began and remove that black mark from our family history.

  The alphabetical journey—which I chronicled in my first book—was painful at times. Including for those around me (my wife started to fine me one dollar for every irrelevant fact I inserted into conversation). And frankly, I’ve forgotten 98 percent of what I’d learned. But it was also an amazing experience. Uplifting, even. After eighteen months of reading about the sweep of history, I emerged with more faith in humanity. I read about all the unfathomably evil things we’ve done, but also all the mind-boggling good ones (the art, the medicine, the flying buttresses of Gothic cathedrals). On balance, it seemed the good outweighed the bad, if only by a sliver.

  Having checked off the mind, I was inspired enough to work on my spirit. I chose this next because I grew up
without any religion or spirituality at all. As I wrote in a book about this project, I’m Jewish, but I’m Jewish in the same way the Olive Garden is Italian. Not very. But my wife had just given birth to our first son, and we were grappling with what to teach him about our heritage. So I decided to learn the Bible inside out—by living it.

  I chose to follow all of the Good Book’s hundreds of rules. I wanted to obey the famous decrees, like “love thy neighbor” and the Ten Commandments. But I also wanted to pay attention to the often ignored, lesser-known rules, such as “don’t shave your beard” and “don’t wear clothes of mixed fibers.” I wanted to see which would improve my life and which were not so relevant to twenty-first-century America.

  It was another experience that was simultaneously profound and absurd, manufactured and life-changing. When the year ended, I shaved my Ted Kaczynski–like facial hair and started wearing poly-cotton blends again, but I’ve kept much from my biblical life. I try to observe the Sabbath, for instance, and to be grateful, and to avoid gossiping. “Try” is the key word here, especially on the gossip one.

  Which brings me to the final quest, the last leg of the bar stool: Remake my body.

  As with my other adventures, this one is fueled, in good part, by ignorance. I know astoundingly little about my own body. I know the small intestine comes before the large intestine. I know the heart is the size of two fists and that it has four chambers. But the Krebs cycle? The thymus? Presumably I read about them in the encyclopedia, but they are not in the 2 percent I retained.

  And even more to the point, I don’t know what to eat or drink or the best way to exercise. It’s a bizarre situation. It’s like owning a house for forty-one years and being unaware of the most basic information, such as how to work the kitchen sink. Or where to find the kitchen sink. Or what this so-called kitchen is all about.