Weight vests, what happens when you stop taking Ozempic, recommendations, and more.
The Expedition: 23 ideas to improve your life this month.
Housekeeping
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Pro Compression created the official Two Percent sock for my 850-mile hike. It will help you get in more miles and survive the apocalypse comfortably. Get 40 percent off with code EASTER.
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Audio version
It’s located at the bottom of this post. Full warning: Expedition episodes are better read due to the infographics and videos.
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 well and long.
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:
A forthcoming rucking manual.
Numbers on:
Car accident deaths.
How self-driving cars impact serious accidents.
The state of boys and men.
Weight vest weight loss magic.
What happens when we ditch our smartphones for two weeks.
Childhood obesity.
The power of walking meetings.
Exercise and depression.
Four stories you should read.
What happens when you stop taking GLP-1 weight loss drugs
An exercise you definitely need to do (related to the Two Percent Fitness Standards).
A useful food infographic.
A piece of exercise equipment I love.
A new TV series I recommend.
A wacky podcast series I loved.
A parting quote
Let’s roll …
Book: Walk with Weight
I get a lot of questions about rucking. So I took everything I’ve learned about rucking, did much more research, and put it all into a book. Walk with Weight comes out in February, but you can pre-order it now.
Think of the book as an instruction manual for walking with weight. It explains why walking with weight matters for humans, its health and performance benefits, and includes:
Answers to all of your rucking questions.
How to start if you’re a beginner and how to level up if you’ve been rucking for years.
Training plans based on your fitness goals and how much time you have.
Strategies and tactics for fat loss and enhanced health benefits.
And lots more.
If you’re interested, here’s a link to pre-order it on Amazon now.
Note: This book is a guide/manual for rucking. It’s not the book I hiked 850 miles for. That book is more akin to a follow-up to The Comfort Crisis and comes out in late 2026 or early 2027.
By the numbers
40,990
Americans died in car accidents in 2023. That’s a …
24.6
… percent increase in car accident deaths compared to 2013.
91
Percent fewer serious car crashes occurred in Waymo vehicles, which are self-driving robotaxi cars.
33,000 to 39,000
Fewer deaths we’d have each year if every vehicle on the road performed like Waymo vehicles.
40,000
American men die each year from suicide. Boys and men account for 80 percent of deaths from suicide. That’s “about the same as the loss of women’s lives from breast cancer,” points out
.16
Calories fewer a day people burned when they lost weight and wore a weight vest. That’s impressive, because weight loss usually leads to a drastic decrease in resting metabolism.
For comparison, people who lost weight but didn’t wear a vest saw their daily resting metabolic rate drop by 237 calories.
The participants who wore a weight vest also regained half of the weight they’d lost, while the people who didn’t wear a vest had regained all the lost weight within two years.
2
Weeks without internet on smartphones led to improved mental health, subjective well-being, and sustained attention. “When people did not have access to mobile internet, they spent more time socializing in person, exercising, and being in nature,” the authors wrote.
Note: In the study, the participants used an application that blocked the phone’s “smart” features, like internet and internet apps, but they could still maintain mobile communication through texts and calls, and could use their desktop computers to access the internet.
A dumb phone is looking smarter every day …
2025
Is the year that, for the first time, more children between the ages of 5 and 19 are living with obesity than are underweight.
34
Percent longer sit-down meetings took compared to walking and standing meetings.
The sit-down meetings didn’t produce better outcomes, despite their longer times.
4
Months of exercising for 150 minutes a week was shown to be just as effective as taking an antidepressant for depression.
Note: Some people use this type of data to argue that antidepressants are useless. It’s more complex than that. Exercise alone can help many cases of depression, but other cases would benefit from both medication and exercise.
From here you’ll learn:
-Four stories you should read (protein, moods, continuous glucose monitors, research)
-What happens when you stop taking GLP-1s like Ozempic
-Video of an exercise you should do (related to our realistic fitness standards post).
-A piece of exercise equipment I love.
-A new TV series I recommend.
-A podcast series I loved.
-An important parting quote.