I used to work with a man, let’s call him Jerry. Every year, when he went to his doctor for a physical and was asked what his height was he would add an inch to the previous year’s number. The reason he said was BMI, body mass index, the ratio of a person’s height to their weight that many physicians use as a gauge of whether you are overweight.

Jerry said he wanted his height to increase to compensate for his expanding waist and increasing height. That way his BMI would remain pretty much the same from year to year and his doctor wouldn’t ask him to go on a diet.

“I’m not overweight, I’m just under height” was his explanation.

A well-rounded figure

Apparently Jerry is not the only one doing this. A new study out says that when people are asked to provide their own weight in research surveys they underestimate their weight and overestimate their height. Women are worse than men at doing this. And white women are the worst of all for fudging the numbers.

Now, the researchers, in the journal Ethnicity and Disease say this is not a big deal and people don’t over or underestimate by a lot, just enough to throw the BMI measurement off by a point or two. Which is good news for the researchers because it means their findings are still close enough to the truth to be valid.

But it’s not such good news for ordinary people. I know none of us like to admit we might be a little overweight and so it doesn’t hurt to lie to someone asking us about our weight. Particularly if we’re only off by a small amount.  But who are we really fooling?

The researchers are not going to judge you about your height or weight. All they care about is their data and the odds of them ever seeing you again are slim. So it’s not as if they’re likely to come up to you in the supermarket one day and say “hey, didn’t you say you were 5′ 7″? You only look 5′ 6″ to me.”

But if we are lying to complete strangers about the fact that we are overweight, then we’re probably also lying to ourselves.

It’s like watching those men at the gym who stand in front of the mirror sucking their gut in as hard as they can. They glance at themselves and think “yeah, I look pretty good for my age”. But as soon as they walk away from the mirror they relax their muscles, their belly drops and they look like a naked version of porky pig. It’s not pretty believe me.

Ultimately it all boils down to this: you can’t fix a problem if you don’t acknowledge that you have a problem. Pretending you are taller than you are, or smaller than you are, or thinner than you are, or lighter than you are just means you are hiding from yourself.

Jerry got away with his little game for a few years until one of the office staff, who was taking down the information, asked if he really was 6′ 7′? Jerry looked surprised, then said “oh, I must have shrunk a little”. The tech looked at his belly and it was clear that at least one part of Jerry wasn’t shrinking.

That was the moment Jerry decided he probably should do something about his weight. Because lord knows he couldn’t do anything about his height.

I have never made any secret of the fact that I hate yoga. Mostly because I have spent a lifetime doing sports that compact all my muscles and here comes this ancient exercise or meditation or whatever you want to call it that pulls everything out and forces me to stretch parts of me that don’t want to stretch and twist things that shouldn’t twist and have me assume positions that are just not natural. So when I recently saw an article in the New York Times saying that yoga might be bad for people my initial thought was “yeah, I was right all along.” The article said all that twisting and bending can be bad for you, it can strain muscles, rip tendons, pull your back out of shape.

But then I thought

Why am I doing this?

Wait a minute, any exercise can do that to you. If you haven’t played soccer in years then you can hurt yourself doing that. If you used to love ping pong as a kid and took it up again as an adult you can hurt yourself. And maybe yoga is a slightly exaggerated form of any exercise because it really works every single part of your body, but the basic premise is the same. If you do it properly and carefully and with good guidance it can be safe and really beneficial.

That’s not to mean I like it any more, but it does mean that it isn’t dangerous just because you do it wrong or have a crappy teacher who teaches you bad form or you try to get into a full lotus when you have spent the previous ten hours sitting in front of a computer screen and wonder why your tendons just don’t want to go there.

The point is, exercise in any form can be bad for you if you haven’t done it before – or for a long time – and you do it badly. You need to know what you are doing or work with someone who knows what they are doing and knows how to show you how to do it.

Good form is essential

The other day, the other month actually, I pulled the heck out of my calf muscle playing squash. I wasn’t doing anything I hadn’t done a thousand times before. I wasn’t moving in a way I hadn’t done a thousand times before. And yet this time, for whatever reason, my calf went kablooey. Maybe I was just pushing it too hard, or my form was bad. All I know is that as soon as I hit a great cross court shot and was moving back into position in case my opponent – damn you Austin – got it back, my calf went bang and that was that. I’ve been slowly getting back in shape since then. But it takes time. And patience.

And that’s why when I read that article about yoga being bad for you, much as I wanted to jump on the blog and say “see, the NY Times agrees with me” my own experience taught me otherwise. Yes, of course yoga can be bad for you. Playing tiddlywinks can be bad for you if one of them jumps up and hits you in the eye. Anything, done badly, can be bad for you. But that’s no reason to dismiss the enormous potential health benefits of yoga.

Downward facing “you dawg you”

Don't try this at home folks

I once met an 83 year old man who had become a devotee of Bikram yoga. That’s the kind where they heat the room to 110 degrees so you sweat like crazy. It’s meant to warm up the muscles and tendons in your body so that they are more flexible. It’s also meant to replicate the conditions in India where yoga first was practiced. This gentleman had only taken up yoga when he was 80 and swore by Bikram, saying it gave him more energy, made him feel healthier and happier.

Frankly I think he just liked watching lots of young, cute women bend into positions that in his youth would have been unthinkable.

I still don’t like yoga. But I would never tell other people not to do it. For my 83 year old friend it’s the highlight of his day. And that’s reason enough to do any exercise isn’t it.

When was the last time you sat down at the computer and just focused on one project, one issue, for one hour, without being distracted or checking your email, or finding out the latest celebrity gossip, or seeing how your sports team did, or finding a really funny video showing a cat water-skiing.

Yeah, I thought so. Me neither. But don’t worry. You are not alone. OK, we are not alone.

Short attention span

According to a new study, in the past decade the average attention span has dropped dramatically from 12 minutes to five minutes. Five minutes. That’s barely enough time to boil a hard-boiled egg. Hardly enough time to make a decent cup of tea. You wouldn’t even be halfway through the Derek and the Dominos classic  “Layla” (OK, that dates me) before your time is up.

The study says that today the average office worker checks their email 30 to 40 times an hour. An hour. It’s like a Pavlovian response. The little image appears in the corner of your screen or a sound goes off telling you there’s a new email in your inbox and you rush there to check it out. Odds are it’s going to be worthless or something that could have waited a few minutes, or quite  honestly a few hours, or days or weeks or you could even ignore it completely and life would go on. Yet still you feel the need to go and check it out right, right, now.

To delay might mean. Well, what!

Exactly. We are rushing around from one thing to another and not necessarily doing anything better or more skillfully or thoughtfully. All we are doing is doing it faster. The downside of that is that anything that forces us to slow down, or – god forbid – stop – then just drives us crazy. We’re addicted to speed. Addicted to multiple stimuli at the same time.

Addicted is the right word to use in this context. This new study found that social media may even be changing the way our brains work, re-wiring our circuitry, making us impatient and forgetful and distracted.

OK, what was I saying?

Slow down, let it sink in

Think about it. When was the last time you watched a video – other than a movie – that lasted more than a few minutes. How often do you just dismiss out of hand anything that looks as though it might take a few minutes to watch or read. How often do you just move on from an article that actually requires some real thinking, maybe even reading it a couple of times to understand it.

We are trying to save time. Instead we are losing our minds.

There are many famous germaphobes in history, people who are literally terrified at the thought of coming into contact with germs.

Nice shoes Howard

Take Howard Hughes for example. The billionaire aviator, movie producer and business tycoon was deathly afraid of germs. He spent the last few years of his life in darkened hotel rooms that he believed he had turned into germ-free zones. Even then he had tissue paper spread over the floor, and wore tissue boxes on his feet when he walked around so he wouldn’t come into contact with the carpet.

Businessman, TV “star” and erstwhile Presidential candidate Donald Trump is almost as wacky. He refuses to touch the ‘ground floor’ button in an elevator because he is convinced it’s the dirtiest button in the building, and tries to never shake hands with anyone, particularly teachers.

But while those two represent the extremes of germaphobia there are many other folks who just like to protect themselves, as much as they can, from the routine, everyday germs. And who can blame them.  The problem is how do you know what are the places most likely to contain the most germs?

Well, a new study has a list of the skankiest places around, the locations and objects that are absolutely teeming with things you’d rather not think about let alone touch.

Researchers at the University of Arizona enrolled hygienists to swab the surfaces of 350 of what they considered the most frequently touched surfaces in city’s like Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Dallas and Philadelphia. They then measured the level of contamination of those surfaces to see which ones had the highest levels of illness-causing bacteria.

Here’s where they found the highest concentrations:

• 71% of gas pump handles
• 68% of mailbox handles
• 43% of escalator rails
• 41% of ATM buttons
• 40% of parking meters
• 35% of crosswalk buttons
• 35% of vending machine buttons

Nasty eh! And they’re all everyday objects that are hard to avoid, unless you want to live in a vacuum or a darkened hotel room wearing boxes on your feet. So, what’s the solution?

Soap. Water. Hand sanitizer. Never touch your hand to your face until you’ve washed it. Never touch your hand to someone else’s face until they’ve washed it. Never touch anyone. Never let anyone touch you. Or stand near you. Or breathe near you.

Or you could just face up to the fact that you already have billions of bacteria on every part of your body and in every part of your body so you are already pretty much infected and the things you’ll come across on those surfaces are probably no worse than what you already have.

You could try to live inside a bubble, or avoid contact with other members of your species. But then you’d end up looking like Donald Trump. And you really don’t want that to happen now do you!

Hair-raising thought

Some awards are really sought after – the Nobel prize, an Oscar – and then there are those no one wants to win – such as the Golden Raspberry, the flip side of the Oscars, given to the person judged to be the worst actor of the year.

Add to that list the Ig Nobel prizes, given to some of the strangest research projects and studies of the year. And believe me, some of these are really strange, to the point where you wonder how on earth did they get funding for this and why on earth would they even think that if they did get money that the findings were worth reporting.

Anyway – here some of this year’s winners.

Physiology prize - a team of European scientists won this for their study entitled “No evidence of contagious yawning in the red-footed tortoise”. This ground breaking piece of scientific exploration concluded that, unlike people, red-footed tortoises don’t start yawning just because one of their chums is yawning. That’s it. Nothing else. End of story. So, next time you see a red-footed tortoise yawning it’s not because it’s copying someone else, it’s probably just bored by all the scientists who keep following it around

Chemistry prize - a team from Japan won this for their work – and in determining the ideal density of airborne wasabi (pungent horseradish) to awaken sleeping people in case of a fire or other emergency, and for applying this knowledge to invent the wasabi alarm. You read that right. “To invent the wasabi alarm”. What’s wrong with a smoke detector or other alarm. Apparently they lack a pungent smell to alert you that something really really bad is happening.

Medicine prize – scientists in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Australia share the shame in this category for their work demonstrating that people make better decisions about some kinds of things — but worse decisions about other kinds of things‚ when they have a strong urge to urinate. No, really, that’s what they studied, how wise you are when you really need to pee. The best bit though is the title of their research: Inhibitory Spillover: Increased Urination Urgency Facilitates Impulse Control in Unrelated Domains

And if you thought those were crazy, check this one out.

Public Safety prize – John Senders at the University of Toronto in Canada, conducted a series of experiments in which a person drives an automobile on a major highway while a visor repeatedly flaps down over his face, blinding him. The goal was to test just how this might interfere with your ability to drive safely. I think the answer would be quite a lot, but what do I know. I’m no scientist.

But my favorite award is the

Mathematics prize -this was shared by a bunch of people who all made predictions about when the earth would come to an end. It includes Dorothy Martin who guessed we’d all be done by 1954, Pat Robertson (yes, that Pat Robertson) who guessed 1982, Elizabeth Clare Prophet (1990) and Harold Camping who thought it would all come to a nasty end on both September 6, 1994 and then again on October 21 of this year. Well done Harold for sticking to your guns. The Ig Nobel folks honored them for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations.

Amen to that.

I have this theory that the rising rates of dementia and Alzheimer’s are connected to the increasing use of computers. No, don’t go away, it’ll make sense when I explain it. Probably.

Your brain in a computer

See, as computers get more powerful they need more and more memory. And that memory has to come from some where. I know, you probably thought it came from those silicon chip things they stick inside the computer. But I think that’s only part of the answer.

You can’t get something from nothing

I think there is a limited amount of memory in the universe and as you use more in one area you have to take it from somewhere. So, as your PC or Apple gets more and more powerful, and faster and has more memory, it’s coming from the universe – namely me and you. And that’s why, as you marvel at the speed that your computer is working you might also pause to consider that it’s coming at the expense of your Aunt Mabel who, as the rest of the family have noticed, is not quite as quick as she used to be.

Now, I bring this all up because while we may not be able to turn back the technological tide that is sucking up our memory, there are a number of things we can do in our everyday life to help reduce the likelihood that it’s our memory that is sucked up into the iPad.

Pump it up

One is that any exercise you do that gets your heart pumping could also have a big impact on your brain, reducing your risk of dementia or other memory problems. The study, from the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings, examined 1,600 research papers and found that most of the science seems to point firmly to exercise as being a great way to not only promote physical health but also mental health.

The best part was that the exercise didn’t have to be hugely strenuous or demanding, it just had to be demanding enough to raise your heart rate and increase your body’s need for oxygen; that could be everything from going to the gym, to going for a walk, raking leaves or shoveling snow.

So, as the fall and winter draw near get out those rakes and shovels. They could help do more than just keep the driveway clear, they could help you keep your mind clear as well.

When bad things happen people often rush to judgement; they are quick to find fault, to figure out who’s to blame and why, and what needs to be done about it. That can happen in something as intimate as a relationship or friendship, in a broader context in the workplace, or – as recently happened in England – on a national scale after a series of violent and deadly riots.

London's Burning

In the days and weeks following the riots in the UK, the newspapers, TV and radio were filled with the voices of the professional pontificating class all mourning the end of standards and manners and all sense of decency, blaming it on the welfare state, the collapse of the family, too much immigration, too little education, a lack of respect for the social order, too much respect for the celebrity culture, and calling for the return of flogging/hanging/birching, the return of the draft, and calling for all those guilty to be locked up and the key thrown away.

Hang ‘em all

All terribly satisfying to write I’m sure but woefully short on any insight into what happened and why and what really needs to be done about it.

But then that’s not too terribly surprising. Because apparently that’s what always happens after things like this. The Economist magazine had a wonderful article that dug back into past coverage of similar upheavals in British society- and I mean way back into the past, through the 1970′s to the 1930′s and the 1880′s and all the way back to 1751, a time when the US didn’t exist and was still a part of the British Empire. What’s fascinating is that regardless of the era or the event, the way commentators wrote back then was exactly the same way they wrote just now.

In the 1950′s for example the arrival of – shock horror – rock n roll in England had the upper classes appalled, as was evident from this article in the Daily Mail; “It is deplorable. It is tribal. And it is from America. It follows rag-time, blues, dixie, jazz, hot cha-cha and the boogie-woogie, which surely originated in the jungle. We sometimes wonder whether this is the negro’s revenge.”

Wonderfully lurid stuff

Take a trip a little further back, to 1898, and folks are lamenting the fact that fathers are no longer whipping their kids. I kid you not!

My favorite is from 1913 where one social commentator is warning people of the dangers of – wait for this – silent movies, claiming that watching images of criminals in films will encourage children to copy them. Sound familiar eh! This is what the venerable The Times of London had to say on the subject: “All who care for the moral well-being and education of the child will set their faces like flint against this new form of excitement.”

Like flint.

Boy, they don’t write them like that anymore.

Back in 1862 a crime wave led to the restoration of flogging in England, only a few years after it had been banned. So horrified were the chattering classes back then – and let’s face it we’re talking about rich white geezers – that The Times once again felt obliged to opine on the topic with this editorial; “Our streets are actually not as safe as they were in the days of our grandfathers. We have slipped back to a state of affairs that would be intolerable even in Naples.”

Even in Naples. Clearly there was no such thing as politically correct language back then. (Historical footnote – at the time the English used to consider Naples the epitome of a criminal, dirty, dangerous city; actually, come to think of it they probably thought the same about Glasgow, Lisbon, Vladivostok, Boston and pretty nearly every city in the world except for London – and even then there were certain parts of London they didn’t particularly like)

Don’t rush to judgement

But the point is that there have always been jerks who react with a knee jerk response to anything they don’t understand, or anything that they feel or fear threatens them in any way. That’s not to say that these issues are not important and don’t require serious thought and serious action to make sure they don’t happen again. But just blaming the first group that comes to mind – hooligans, working class youth, thugs, immigrants, people from Naples! – doesn’t do anything to make things better.

Similarly in relationships – personal or professional – just falling back on the same old arguments, the same old reasoning doesn’t resolve any problems, in many ways it just perpetuates them. If something goes wrong and your response is simply to dredge up the past you never get anywhere. You remain stuck forever in the same old manner of thinking. Instead we need to take the time to think about what’s really the problem, why things really are going wrong. Only then can we come up with a solution that will really work.

Otherwise we are no better than people from Naples!

Fast backward

If you thought TV was bad for your brain a new study says it’s doing just as much damage to your heart! In fact this study says that if you watch TV for six hours a day you may be shortening your life by five years. Five years! That’s amazing. Those Kardashian girls are killing you in ways you hadn’t even imagined.

Death Watch

Now this is not some anti-TV nutcase just trying to get you to do something crazy like read books or go for a walk, these are well regarded Australian scientists who have their paper in a respected medical publication – the British Journal of Sports Medicine - and the researchers say that just sitting there watching TV for hours at a time is as dangerous for you as smoking or not doing any exercise (which come to think of it would fall under the sitting watching TV banner as well, but I digress…….)

Now, there’s lots of things I could write about the methodology they used to come up with their findings but that’s rather dry and you can read it if you go to the study itself. What is interesting is that they calculated that in 2008 Australian adults (25 years and older) watched 9.8 billion hours of TV a year.

Now, while allowing for the fact that Aussies are sports mad and that a single cricket game can last five days that’s still a heck of a lot of TV. It makes me wonder how many bad sitcoms did people watch, how many dreadful reality shows, how many episodes of Australian Idol etc.

One hour more = less

Here’s an even scarier statistic from the researchers: each hour of TV watched after the age of 25 reduced the life expectancy of the viewer by just under 22 minutes. In TV terms, that means each episode of ‘Glee’ means your life is reduced by an episode of ‘Two and a half Men’.

Really, fun as ‘Glee’ is, is it worth missing 22 minutes of Charlie Sheen.

Or, to put it another way. Is it worth watching that re-run of Law and Order (for the 12th time) if it means missing out on playing with your kids, your grandkids, your neighbors kids, your wife/husband/partner/lover/cousin/uncle/goldfish? Or just reading a book. Or just going for a walk. Or just hanging out with people you like who have interesting things to say?

Comparable to smoking

Previous studies show that smoking one cigarette can, on average, reduce your life expectancy by 11 minutes. That’s the same as watching half an hour of TV. So, if you are smoking while you watch TV you might as well gather the family around now, coz you ain’t got long to go and you’ll be lucky to make it to the end of this season’s ‘Dancing With The Stars’

We all can make choices about how we live our lives. And with hundreds of TV channels and On Demand and Apple TV we clearly have a dizzying array of choices of what to watch. I guess the only question now is would we rather watch life on TV or live it ourselves.

Being a bitter person won’t make you a better person. In fact, new research shows it might make you a sicker person.

The study was done by researchers at Concordia University and one of them, Carsten Wrosch, concluded that “persistent bitterness may result in global feelings of anger and hostility that, when strong enough, could affect a person’s physical health. ”

Toxic emotions

Bitter is bad

Wrosch and his colleagues say that some emotions – such as regret – are directed inward and are about blaming yourself for errors you made. In contrast bitterness is directed outward, and is about blaming others. It may be that you blame someone because you didn’t get the job you wanted, or the promotion  you thought you deserved, or even just the respect you feel you merit at home.

Regardless of the cause that failure can prove toxic and if you hold on to it for a long time then it can slowly poison you in unexpected ways, not just mentally by leaving you fixated on what happened or even consumed by thoughts of revenge, but also physically such as by suppressing your immune function.

Avoid the pitfalls

The good news is that Wrosch and his chums say bitterness can be avoided.  People can start by trying to find other ways to achieve their original goals.

If that fails people can revise their goals and find something else to aim for or just gain a more realistic sense of what they can achieve, if they didn’t get the promotion they wanted maybe it’s time to look for a new job. If the marriage they are in is beyond saving then maybe it’s time to accept that and try to discover new love and passion.

And maybe the most powerful weapon that people can deploy in helping them move past these feelings of anger and resentment and bitterness is the simplest one. Forgiveness.