Issues with antidepressants, a great book, avoiding running injuries, and more.
15 ideas to improve your life this month.
Housekeeping
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Audio version
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The post
The Expedition is our monthly journey into thoughts, opinions, ideas, observations, studies, facts, figures, etc.
Good ones, insightful ones, interesting ones, weird ones, and ones you can use to live better.
It’s a roundup of all the worthwhile stuff I’ve discovered in the last month. The Expedition is a bit of an island of misfit toys. But, hey, the greatest journeys are winding.
This month, we’re covering:
Numbers on:
Calories the average American eats per day.
Minutes of daily exercise the average American gets.
How to avoid running injuries.
A badass 80-year-old.
Kids with pre-diabetes.
Fast food consumption.
Something about legumes?
Antidepressant drug study problems.
Another reason dogs are the best.
A perfect rant about success from the world’s best golfer.
Five reasons your VO2 Max might not be increasing.
The easiest way to eat less junk food, according to new research.
A good book about human health.
A damning confession about my TV habits.
An important parting quote about life and regret.
Let’s roll …
By the numbers
3,540
Calories the average American eats per day.
20
Minutes the average American is physically active per day (even walking counts).
64
Percent increase in injuries experienced by runners who increased a run’s distance 10 to 30 percent more than their longest run over the past 30 days.
The lesson: Increase your mileage slowly. When I was ramping up mileage for an ultra-distance run, I added half a mile total each week. I didn’t get injured.
80
Age of Bob Becker, a Florida man who recently completed the Badwater 135, which runs through Death Valley and is considered one of the toughest ultramarathons on Earth.
Congratulations to Bob for the epic finish and restoring some dignity to the term “Florida man.”
One Third
Of American kids aged 12 to 17 has pre-diabetes.
At the same time …
11.4
Percent of total daily calories that come from fast food among kids ages 2 to 19. That’s down from 14 percent in 2014.
The figures for adults decreased by roughly the same amount.
It’s probably good that we’re eating less fast food, but we still seem to be eating too many calories overall, as suggested by the fact that we’ve gained weight over the last decade.
8
Percent reduction in the risk of death for every ~1 ounce increase in daily legume consumption. The study focused on the diets of elderly people in Japan, Sweden, Australia, and Greece.
If you’re like me, you might be wondering, “Wait, WTF is a legume again?” Glad you asked.
Legumes are peanuts, chickpeas, beans, peas, and lentils.
Now back to the study: It’s important to know that legumes likely aren’t magic. Rather, if you eat more legumes, you probably eat less crap overall—and have other healthy habits. Start stacking those good habits …
8 to 12
That’s the number of weeks the average antidepressant study lasts, but most people take the drugs for far longer. Some thinkers believe we’ve underplayed the potential long-term risks and withdrawal symptoms of long-term antidepressant use.
As Dr. Joanna Moncrieff said, “Studying what happens to people after just eight to 12 weeks on antidepressants is like testing car safety by crashing a vehicle into a wall at 5 miles an hour—ignoring the fact that real drivers are out on the roads doing 60 miles an hour.”
40
Percent lower risk of developing dementia experienced by dog owners. The effect was greatest in dog owners who exercised and weren’t socially isolated.
Now please enjoy this photo of my dementia-lowering children.
A great rant about success
Scottie Scheffler, the world’s best golfer by far, starts this press conference with the following line:
“I’m not here to inspire somebody else to be the best player in the world, because what’s the point? This is not a fulfilling life. It’s fulfilling from a sense of accomplishment, but it’s not fulfilling from a sense of the deepest places of your heart.”
I’ll let him take it from here.
Author and friend of Two Percent Brad Stulberg had a great tweet about this. He wrote:
There is no greater trap than thinking that the accomplishment of some goal will fulfill you. What will fulfill you is who you become in the process of going for it … Scottie Scheffler is describing the arrival fallacy: Wherever you are, the goal post is always 10 yards down the field. If you develop a mindset: “If I just accomplish _____, THEN I’ll arrive,” you are in for a rude awakening. There is no arriving. The sooner you realize this, the better … Becoming aware of the arrival fallacy is freeing. You no longer expect accomplishment or achievement to fulfill you. Instead, you start doing everything you can to find happiness, fulfillment, and energy in the process of pursuing your goals rather than having false expectations about what will happen when you do (or don’t) attain them.
Or, as the Buddhist monk and clinical psychologist Jack Kornfield put it, “After the ecstasy, the laundry.”