or vow?

I think Paul Chek said that — his book “How to Eat Move and Be Healthy” is a good resource on a lot of health related topics, but his materials and recommendations get a little overly complex for my tastes.

Along these lines, I tend to follow Mark Sisson (of Frimal Blueprint fame) and Art DeVany, because I would like to look like they do in their 50s and 70s, respectively. DeVany is especially impressive and I like how he relates his ideas to power laws, stochastic processes and N. Taleb’s work. But I don’t follow them religiously either.

I also follow a calorie restriction list-serv, because those folks are on the extreme end of the eating spectrum and are always trying to maximize their nutrition per caloric intake. They are also crazy OCD about bio-markers and the latest research.

Although you younger folks may scoff, one thing I think is important it to get bloodwork done every year to see if what you are doing is really improving your health on the inside, especially cholesterol ratios. (Total cholesterol is almost worthles, IMO.) If its not, you need to make changes.

I hope my habbits change for the better when i get out of the office for good!

Thinking of the Warrior Diet, you should check out Martin Berkhan’s website, http://www.leangains.com. He is a proponent of Intermittent Fasting, where one fasts for 16 hours and eats for 8 (approximately). He has a lot of science behind his method, which might be interesting to you or those who read your site.

Anyways, I love reading your stuff. The daily “reposts” is very convenient for those of us who recently found your site. I get a few “new to me” articles every day. Keep up the great work. My wife and I are working towards independence right now. We are saving just under 50% of our income and hope to increase that as we bring expenses down and increase income through raises and job changes (and hopefully other sources).

Thanks again for the great site.

Jeff

I’m thinking of trying to eat once a day. My theory is that eating and digesting is time consuming and taxing on the body. Doing it several times of day just seems silly to me now.

I find that grant based research focus almost exclusively of “shovel ready” material, that is, small incremental “improvements” on the status quo. I’d say, if you as an engineer want to do something meaningful, look into appropriate technology. There’s a big DIY culture around this. For physics, especially theoretical physics, it’s pretty much a done deal. Almost all science today is so-called “big science” meaning big grants, big experiments, lots of people each doing their small part in the big project. Not saying that big break throughs don’t happen through singular efforts anymore. Consider the recent breakthrough in mathematics. It’s just getting quite unlikely and you pretty much have to find some other way of funding. Grants are somewhat of a “insider’s club”. Publish or perish.

I love your site, it’s very refreshing! We are a mid 20s engineering married couple with a mchouse and a new born. We want ERE because we find the corporate lifestyle boring and unstimulating intellectually. We are desperate to use our brains and not just design another widget for the masses.

We are planning on have a few more offsprings and bought the largest house that we needed till age 60. Now we are hoping to have the house paid off in 7 years and start semi-retirement. Our challenge is finding freelance work that will let us do meaningful work. All the freelance work I see is very unappealing because they are not challenging. I am sure you find the same issue with your degree. No one seems to give grants to research about exploratory technology on a part time basis. Have to tried to find part time work in your field

As for the food, don’t you find your budget limiting in terms of diversity? We cook from scratch but we love love good food. We are always trying new recipes so our food budget for 2 plus a large dog is over $400.

About how many calories are you taking in? I have the opposite problem of most people which is that I have trouble gaining and maintaining weight, rather than losing it…

I did indeed remove the comment dates to avoid the “old post stigma” from the comments themselves. I think it works very well seeing that I don’t have many “timely” posts. I have tried as much as possible to prevent those from getting reposted.

Also wanted to mention that I have noticed your efforts to revisit posts and threads, and think it works almost seamlessly. You seem to have removed dates and times from the comments, which allows a read to ignore (or not be able to adjudicate) relevancy/currency based upon date-time alone.