Evolving yourself into your best self

One of the biggest life lessons I had in 2009 was that my personality is in a state of constant change. The change may be small, subtle, and quiet or take big, life-changing leaps, but it's there and it's continuous. The fact that personality changes over time is not a big surprise in itself; I think everyone can take a look back a few years and immediately see how they were different back then compared to who they are now. However, I've hold the assumption that it takes major life experiences - such as break-ups, marriages, parents getting divorced, moving to live on your own for the first time etc. - for a personality to change, but considering everything that has happened in my own thought and behavior patterns during 2009, I have had to abandon that belief.

According to Dictionary.com, the definition of psychological personality is

a) the sum total of the physical, mental, emotional, and social characteristics of an individual.

b) the organized pattern of behavioral characteristics of the individual.

In psychology, the act of learning implies behavior change. Meaning, that when something is learned, the behavior of the learner changes as a result. If personality then is an organized pattern of behavioral characteristics of an individual, learning changes also the personality of the learner. This does not require major life experiences. With open and curious mind it's easily possible to learn something new every single day, and the cumulative outcome of that learning is a changed personality.

It's very important to realize, that no one is born more confident, social, outgoing, competitive, creative etc. than anyone else. Your early life experiences are paramount in the forming of your personality, which affects how you behave and think in different situations. Although your personality greatly determines how you think and act, the way you think and act also affects your personality. It's a two-way connection.

Want to become more social? Study how those you consider more social than you behave in group situations. How do they look at people? How do they listen to others? What kind of body language they use? How do they project their voice? And most importantly, how do they behave differently compared to you? What is your current situation, and what needs to be changed to get from where you are to where you want to be?

You can learn a great deal by observing other people. After all, it is by watching others that we have learnt most of the essentials in life such as walking and speaking. We have an innate tendency to model our behavior after those around us. Just watch how two best friends mirror each others' wording, phrases, or body language and you know what I'm talking about.

So, in order to actually become more social, and have that characteristic become an ingrained, natural part of your personality, you need to first start behaving like a social person. Make a conscious effort to act differently than the "regular you" would. Use the information you've gained when observing others and model your behavior to fit the image of a social person you've created in your mind. It's not easy, and it takes focus and willpower to do something that doesn't come naturally to you, but the more you do it the easier it gets. This is a sign of the new behavior starting to become an integrated part of who you are.

If I had been told over a year ago that this kind of personality change is possible, I probably wouldn't have believed it. However, considering how much my own personality has changed during the past year, I can't really deny it either. For example, I began to build my confidence simply by starting to look people in the eye whenever I was walking outside. Then I focused on doing it while I was listening and speaking to others. And yes, it took quite a bit of conscious effort at first, but nowadays I don't even need to think about it. It comes automatically. After getting used to maintaining eye-contact, I began to study and focus on adopting more subtle signs of a confident person such as how to greet people, how to enter a room, how to take control of my environment, how to speak in a more confident manner etc. There is still work to do and room for improvement, but it's easy to recognize how I feel much more confident than I did only a few months ago, before I started to make this conscious behavior change.

Two more things you can do to help the process are visualization and having inner discussions inside your head. Visualize being in social situations and acting the way you would like to act. Imagine yourself being the soul of the party, imagine people enjoying having conversations with you. This might sound like fantasy stuff, but many top-level athletes, public speakers, and other successful people practice visualization. There is also a lot of literacy about its importance and effectiveness. And anyway, it's not like you're going to lose anything by doing it ;)

By inner discussions I mean talking to yourself like you're your own best friend. It's ridiculous how many people constantly criticize and put themselves down in their thoughts. Instead, psyche yourself up when going to a social situation. Say to yourself: "Bro, you look awesome tonight! Everyone is waiting for you to come so they can have a chat with you. You will leave a great impression on everyone as you talk with them in your calm, confident manner. You know and they know, that if you weren't going to show up the evening wouldn't be nearly as much fun as it's going to be now. All thanks to you!"

I believe strongly, that the inner discussions - or thought-chatter as some like to call it - and visualizations have an impact on your subconscious mind. I also believe, that we are in much less control of our actions than we would like to admit. Instead, the subconscious mind is steering us towards different paths, different decisions, depending on how we think and what our beliefs are. By visualizing yourself as a very social person, you're giving instructions to your subconscious mind that this social person is who you really are. As a result, the way you behave may start to change without you even noticing it at first, as it all feels very natural and you are just 'being yourself'.

A study [download PDF] was done in 2007 that very profoundly demonstrates just how powerful the mind can be, and how much power visualization has: A group of athletes were instructed to visualize exercising their hip muscles, and without any actual gym training or physical activity they had similar strength gains (24% increase in physical strength) as a control group who went to the gym and did the actual hip exercises (28% increase in physical strength). Apparently the mind cannot make a difference between real and imagined experiences. Considering that these people actually had significant physiological changes as a result of what they imagined, just think how much visualization could help to change your behavior, attitudes, beliefs, or way of thinking!

Your personality changes whether you like or not. The big questions is; are you willing to take responsibility of who you are now, and to consciously start guiding that personality change in order to become who you want to be, to become your best self?

Why New Year's promises fail, and what to do about it

You have finished cleaning the plate of the last bits of ham. You take a sip of your beer, feel your stomach bulging and think: "This is Christmas, it's ok to indulge and eat in excess. Soon it will be next year, and then I will get back in shape. I will start exercising and eating healthy, and by the summer I'll look great when I'm lying on the beach in my swimming trunks and enjoying the sun. Promise."

I wonder how many thousands, or millions of people are making these kinds of New Year's promises: "I will lose 20 pounds", "I will go to the gym 3 times a week", or "I will become a vegetarian". Few weeks into the future and most of them have quit, and most likely also made up reasons and justifications for themselves about why they had to quit. It's always something external, so that one doesn't have to face the reality of being a failure and take responsibility for it.

There are a few reasons why this happens. One is motivation. And I'm not even talking about how to motivate yourself, or what kind of techniques can be used to build up motivation. Most people lose the motivation to make a change because they haven't really thought the whole thing through. They haven't had a long, honest conversation with themselves about what is the current reality of the situation, and why it needs to be changed. The motivation for losing weight is never the actual event of weight loss, and if you don't look deeper, your motivation will be short lived.

You need to get to the underlying reasons for hitting the gym 3 times a week or losing 20 pounds. Do you want to feel healthy? Do you want others to think you look good? Do you feel that being a bit chubby or skinny prevents you from attracting the opposite sex? If you don't think these things through, you'll never get to the real reasons for making a change in your life, and therefore you'll never find true motivation for doing it.

Besides motivation, information is also an issue. There is too much of it around, and no one is going to tell you about what is right and what is wrong. Everyone's selling their own product, beliefs, and way of thinking. I do this too. I'm very much advocating the low-carb way of life because it works wonders for me, and I feel that it makes logically more sense than any other diet I know besides the paleolithic diet, but that one is rather difficult to achieve in practice.

The thing is, that most people make a New Years promise and then rush into action immediately. They will start going to the gym doing something they assume works, or they will start eating based on their earlier beliefs about what is healthy and what is not. This is exactly what I did. When I decided that it's time to lose the belly over a year ago, I started exercising 5 times a week, eating "healthy", and after 3 months I looked exactly the same as when I started. When you realize, that the struggle of the past 3 months was for nothing, it's a bit difficult to stay motivated.

I'm pretty sure that most New Years promises revolve around losing weight, getting in a good physical shape, or becoming healthier. Now, if an overweight person wants to lose weight, how do you think she will approach the challenge? She will use the exact same information and beliefs that have been stuck inside her head. Now, if she already has that information, why hasn't she been using it to become normal weight already? That's because whatever she thinks she knows is wrong. It's as simple as that.

If we knew, I mean really infallibly knew, what to do to become a healthy, fit person there wouldn't be an obesity epidemic. The problem is, that most people don't face the fact that the mental models and preconceptions they have might be wrong. Cognitive dissonance explains a bit why it is so difficult to admit being wrong. When I say it like this it sounds ridiculous, but there are many people who really, honestly think that they are eating healthy - or have an otherwise healthy lifestyle - yet year-by-year they're gaining weight. It's a very rare individual who actually stops to think that maybe the knowledge she has about a healthy lifestyle is wrong. If she thinks she's eating healthy but still gaining weight all the time, maybe her preconceptions about what actually is healthy are the source of her problems?

Before you can start losing weight, you have to lose your way of thinking. It obviously isn't working, so it's time for a reality shift. It's time to start questioning those beliefs and search for different points of view. It takes some time and commitment, but it's definitely going to give you better results than just rushing into action without thinking thinks through or doing some underlying research about what works and what doesn't.

Go to a library, or Amazon.com, and search for books about diet and nutrition. See what other people say about these topics. What kind of reviews and ratings have they got? Is the author credible? Search for blogs. Even if you don't immediately find the information you seek, they can be a great gateway to other, better websites about the topic, or lead you to a book that will change your life.

This is not applicable only for diet and nutrition, but if you're skinny and have been trying to build muscle for the past months without any results, you're obviously doing something wrong. It's time again for a reality shift, and to question the beliefs you have about muscle hypertrophy. Time to hit Google and start searching for blogs, sites, and books about what we actually know about how to do it. What is the actual science saying about it? That information will be tremendously more useful to you than just relying on monthly tips from Men's Health or similar magazines.

Maybe you've tried to quit smoking three times before with the help of nicotine patches, but failed every time. What makes you think that this time would be any different? You're setting yourself ready for failure unless you question your basic assumptions and beliefs, and come up with a new strategy.

If you made a New Year's promise in order to change some aspect of your life, don't rush into it. Think about it thoroughly to discover what is your real motivation for making that change. Be honest to yourself. Then write down what preconceptions you have about how to actually make the change happen, and question those preconceptions. Don't show mercy to them. Do a little research to see if what you believe is actually backed by solid, preferably scientific, evidence instead of some bloke just believing the same way you do. Only when you have a clear idea about what works and why it works, it's time to take action.

2010 will be a great year. Make sure you get the most out of it!

The best books of 2009

I don't think I've ever read as much as I did in 2009. On top of hundreds of blog posts I've finished somewhere around 40 books. This year has also shaped me a lot as a person. A year ago I was way more shy, overweight guy spending days at work and nights playing World of Warcraft. Now I've started to take much more control over my social life and ambitions, lost 10kg's, and gotten very excited about how the human body and mind works.

This is my list of ten best, most influential books of 2009. Some of them have been published already earlier, so 2009 stands for the year I read them.

The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith

"The 4.8 pounds of grain fed to cattle to produce one pound of beef for human beings represents a colossal waste of resources in a world still teeming with people who suffer from profound hunger and malnutrition," writes Jim Motavalli. Yes, it is a waste, but not for the reasons he thinks. As we have seen in abundance, growing that grain will require the felling of forests, the plowing of prairies, the draining of wetlands, and the destruction of topsoil. In most places on earth, it will never be sustainable, and where it just possibly might be, it will require rotation with animals on pasture. And it's ridiculous to the point of insanity to take that world-destroying grain and feed it to a ruminant who could have happily subsisted on those now extinct forests, grasslands, and wetlands of our planet, whilebuildingtopsoil and species diversity.

This book is arguably the most important one I read in 2009. No other book has carried such a profound message about how and why agriculture has driven species extinct and destroyed ecosystems. Most importantly, this book has taught me about the meaning of topsoil, and because agriculture is destroying topsoil instead of building it, agriculture in itself is not - and cannot be - sustainable.

The Vegetarian Myth also contains a great chapter that puts together information from many books on nutrition, and this book alone provides enough good information about how humans are meant to eat that I deliberately left out all the nutrition-specific books of this list in favor of The Vegetarian Myth. This book is also very beautifully written.

I wrote a longer summation of The Vegetarian Myth earlier this year, which can be read here: Food, justice and sustainability.

The 4-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss

It's lonely at the top. Ninety-nine percent of people in the world are convinced they are incapable of achieving great things, so they aim for the mediocre. The level of competition is thus fiercest for "realistic" goals, paradoxically making them the most time- and energy-consuming. It is easier to raise $10,000,000 than it is $1,000,000. It is easier to pick up the one perfect 10 in the bar than the five 8s.

2009 has been huge for me in terms of personal growth and trying to figure out what I want to do with my life, and I have The 4-hour Workweek to thank for propelling me to this path. This book got me to question many of the things I took for granted in life - mainly that for most people life seems to be a drudgery of birth-study-work-retirement-death. That pattern can be broken, and this book gives you a lot of ideas on how to do it.

The 4-hour Workweek is also an easy, fast, and captivating read. Many of the concepts and advice in the book - and that you could actually have a 4-hour workweek in practice - need to be approached critically. This book is definitely not providing a sure-fire way to achieve success or another "how to get rich quick" sham, but it can give you a lot of motivation to rethink your own life, and for that reason alone I recommend reading it.

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini

What is easy to forget, though, is that everybody else observing the event is likely to be looking for social evidence, too. And because we all prefer to appear poised and unflustered among others, we are likely to search for that evidence placidly, with brief, camouflaged glances at those around us. Therefore everyone is likely to see everyone else looking unruffled and failing to act. As a result, and by the principle of social proof, the event will be roundly interpreted as a nonemergency. This, according to Latané and Darley, is the state of pluralistic ignorance "in which each person decides that since nobody is concerned, nothing is wrong. Meanwhile, the danger may be mounting to the point where a single individual, uninfluenced by the seeming calm of others, would react."

Cialdini's Influence is a must-read for anyone interested in marketing and sales, but it can also be an eye-opening experience for those who just want to know more about how their minds are being manipulated. I remember reading it with my jaw on the floor as I realized time and again how I had acted on different situations, and with the book in my hand I could see the actual triggers that had caused me to behave a certain way. It's slightly unnerving to say the least when you realize that you're not in that much control of your own decisions as you think.

Cialdini demonstrates how our minds are on autopilot most of the time, and how other people - namely marketers - can take advantage of that. Other forms of influence are also covered, such as how we react to authority figures (e.g. the notorious Milgram pain experiment), and how people in general are looking to be lead.

Mistakes were made (but not by me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson

The engine that drives self-justification, the energy that produces the need to justify our actions and decisions - especially the wrong ones - is an unpleasant feeling that Festinger called "cognitive dissonance." Cognitive dissonance is a state of tension that occurs whenever a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent, such as "Smoking is a dumb thing to do because it could kill me" and "I smoke two packs a day." Dissonance produces mental discomfort, ranging from minor pangs to deep anguish; people don't rest easy until they find a way to reduce it. In this example, the most direct way for a smoker to reduce dissonance is by quitting. But if she has tried to quit and failed, now she must reduce dissonance by convincing herself that smoking isn't really so harmful, or that smoking is worth the risk because it helps her relax or prevents her from gaining weight (and after all, obesity is a health risk, too), and so on. Most smokers manage to reduce dissonance in many such ingenious, if self-deluding, ways.

Similarly to Influence, this book will be an unnerving read. It will explain why it is so difficult to change the way you believe about something, and how our thoughts manipulate the reality we see in order to make it fit in the frame we have created. Mistakes were made continues to explain how we justify our decisions in order to reduce cognitive dissonance, such as when we purchase something we don't really need we tend to create all kinds of rationales to justify that action.

There are also very disturbing cases about corruption, and how practically everyone can be corrupted by pulling the right strings. Even more disturbing are the accounts of how police interrogators can make you believe you did something, even though you didn't, and how our minds form false memories that seem very vivid and life-like.

The Game by Neil Strauss

There are certain bad habits we've groomed our whole life - from personality flaws to fashion faux pas. And it has been the role of parents and friends, outside of some minor tweaking, to reinforce the belief that we're okay just as we are. But it's not enough to just be yourself. You have to be your best self. And that's a tall order if you haven't found your best self yet.

Just like The 4-hour Workweek, this book also propelled me towards a change in my life. Where The 4-hour Workweek got me to reconsider my life goals and how to achieve them, The Game got me to re-evaluate dating and relationships.

The book tells the true story of how the author Neil Strauss transformed from a shy, balding geek into Style, one of the world's greatest pickup artists; a guy who could get any woman fall for him. It also gives a thorough overview of how the pickup community (group of guys who turned meeting women, attracting, and seducing them into a form of science - breaking down the whole social interaction into specific steps that need to be taken to get inside her panties) got started in the first place, and how it evolved and changed over years.

I read The Game first when I was flying from Beijing to Helsinki, and I remember finishing the whole book in just two days despite it being close to 500 pages long. It's a roller coaster ride and impossible to put down after you start reading it. The Game is also the only book I've read twice this year, mainly because the first time I read it I was so sleep deprived and didn't have a chance to process it properly, but also because it introduced me a whole new perspective on relationships, which I started to study and research more in-depth.

Reading The Game the second time I had quite a different take on it. The story is still as sexy, captivating, and thrilling as it was on the first time, but on the second reading it became more and more evident how dysfunctional and incomplete most of the people portrayed in the book are, and how their obsession over women causes them to neglect all the other aspects of their lives. It also seems, that most people who became professional pickup artists were trying to validate themselves through women without first figuring out who they themselves really are, and what do they want to achieve in life.

I really recommend The Game for everyone - men and women alike. It will change the way you see social interactions between the sexes.

The E-myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber

Now you understand the task ahead: to think of your business as though it were the prototype for 5,000 more just like it. To imagine that someone will walk through your door with the intention of buying your business - but only if it works. And only if it works without a lot of work and without you to work it. Imagine yourself taking the potential buyer through your business, explaining each component and how it works with every other component. How you've innovated systems solutions to people problems, how you've quantified the results of those innovations, and how you've orchestrated the innovations so that they produce the same results every single time.

This is definitely the best business book I've read the whole year. It's very heavily focused on how to build systems and structures that support your business, drawing inspiration from how McDonald's and other franchise models work. It explains why most small businesses fail, and how to avoid the common potholes on the way to create a successful company that is not dependent on the individuals working there.

Lila by Robert M. Pirsig

The cells Dynamically invented animals to preserve and improve their situation. The animals Dynamically invented societies, and societies Dynamically invented intellectual knowledge for the same reasons. Therefore, to the question, "What is the purpose of all this intellectual knowledge?" the Metaphysics of Quality answers, "The fundamental purpose of knowledge is to Dynamically improve and preserve society." Knowledge has grown away from this historic purpose and become an end in itself, and this growing away from original purposes towards greater Quality is a moral growth. But those original purposes are still there. And when things get lost and go adrift it is useful to remember that point of departure.

Since reading Lila my world view has not been the same. This book builds on the Metaphysics of Quality, which the author Robert M. Pirsig introduced in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I've read both books this year, but Lila was by far easier to understand of the two, and it felt like only after reading Lila I was able to really grasp the concepts that Pirsig was talking about in Zen. However, I'd still recommend reading Zen before Lila, as it contains the background information that is necessary to get the most out of this book.

The Metaphysics of Quality is a philosophy, a theory about reality. It asks questions such as what is real, what is good and what is moral. Pirsig draws on evolutionary biology, sociology, anthropology, psychology, economics, theology... and even quantum physics to make his case about why the Metaphysics of Quality is more fit for understanding our world than e.g. subject-object metaphysics. 

Less Is More by Broeck Vanden

So deeply rooted are past ideas that demanded a further increase in income that questioning this approach is still unfashionable except in certain very limited circles. It is difficult to accept that our income could be sufficient and that our feeling that we do not have enough comes from our failure to use the available resources well, rather than from our need for more.
- Robert Theobald, 1961

Less Is More contains quotations, thoughts, and maxims on the art of conscious living. The content ranges from western to eastern philosophy, from ancient philosophers to modern-day economists. It is an easy read that contains more food for thought than pretty much any other book I've read the whole year, and I heartily recommend it to everyone who is interested in finding true happiness and wants to control material possessions instead of being controlled by them.

Tricks of the Mind by Derren Brown

Cold-reading is at the heart of the psychic's apparent skill. It is the key to understanding how a psychic is seemingly able to know so much about you. If you have ever had a convincing experience with a psychic, or you know someone who has, this is the non-paranormal explanation of how it all can happen. It is fascinating, powerful and hugely manipulative. It can be used covertly in personal and business relationships as well as for pretending you can talk to the dead or read minds. Knowledge of cold-reading techniques can protect you from abusive scum who would happily exploit you in your most desperate hour to put you in touch with a child you have just lost.

I think Derren Brown is by far the best illusionist on the planet; mixing suggestibility, hypnosis, magic and showmanship to pull out some pretty amazing tricks. This book is a very good introduction to topics such as why and how magic works, how we memorize things, what exactly are hypnosis, suggestibility, and Neuro-Linguistic Programming etc.

What I liked most, though, is that the author takes a very rational and skeptical approach to all these things. He does not claim to possess special powers, but instead is very well rooted in critical thinking, of which there is a separate chapter in the book where he also talks about anti-science, pseudo-science, and how our minds work very badly and are easily mislead in certain kinds of situations.

The Seven-Day Weekend by Ricardo Semler

...The majority of college people haven't pinpointed their calling in life. Yet they're presented with a list of choices: medicine or law, art or engineering? They're asked to choose whether they want to spend the next 50 years examining toes or livers, divorcing couples or prosecuting criminals, photographing or painting, building bridges or calculating impellers for pumps.

Alas, by the time they finish college and come to work at places like Semco, GE or Amazon.com, they've been trained to ask why only when solicited, and then only in the strictest sense. They've lost the capacity to question everything from scratch, because they've learned the first and most important lesson in getting along in the system: 'Don't rock the boat.' We wear suits and ties because that's what we do.

The last book I finished reading in 2009 proved very interesting to someone who studies business. Ricardo Semler's ideas about how - and based on which principles - corporations should operate resonated deeply within me. Personally, I hope that values and ideas such as democracy, letting every employee find their own talents and interests, pursue them, and spreading out the responsibility for the company's success to everyone involved in it will become more common in organizations around the world as my generation gets older and starts taking over businesses.

I would be very interested to know what you have read this year. What books have had the biggest impact on you, and what would you recommend to others? I currently have somewhere around 30 books listed that I want to read in 2010, but there's always room for a few more.

Why I don't follow news: Case H1N1

It's been about 6 months since I decided to stop watching news on TV, reading newspapers (except when stealing a glimpse of a headline at the grocery), and following most news sites on the Internet. Back in my high school days I took special pride in reading the morning paper and keeping track on world affairs. But for what purpose? Other than it making me feel smug and superior to those who weren't doing it, I'm not sure I have a good answer.

Photo by just.Luc (just.Censored)

Unless you've been living in a shed, you know as well as any man on the street that the past decade has affected tremendously the availability and amount of information. Even before the Internet, TV and newspapers took care that when something noteworthy happened in the world, it didn't take long for you to get a report. Then came the Internet and the quantity of available information just exploded.

Considering how long we've had TV, or even newspapers, do you think that the human species has had sufficient time to adjust to handle that kind of amount of information? I don't have an answer to this, but I can let you know how deliberately ignoring news has affected my life; I've become happier, and I have more time and energy to focus on things that really matter to me.

I think that the biggest problem with following news is, that considering the time invested in doing it, it doesn't really give you anything in return - except maybe something you can gossip about with your girlfriends. Really. Think about it. If you read about a plane crash, oil spill, or how some economist thinks that the downturn is predicted to end when the swallows migrate back, how is that information really going to affect your actions? What can you do about it? Or how will knowing that piece of news improve your quality of life?

Herbert Simon, who was the pioneer in Attention Economics, argues that the overload of information results in a decrease in human attention:

"...in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it"

I have heard similar concepts elsewhere as well; that we have a limited amount of energy, willpower, or attention to use each day, and wasting that on useless pieces of information will decrease the amount available to really focus and put our hearts into things that matter, things that can have a positive impact on our quality of life.

Being able to focus is a gift. It's a unique ability we humans have that allows us to concentrate on specific things for long periods of time. If asked, productivity gurus and trainers would tell you to figure out what's important in your life, or what are the most important tasks you need to do, and then focus on one task at a time, while eliminating all the distractions that might make your attention to wander. They would probably also tell you to start working on those tasks first thing in the morning, for the simple reason that if you wait until the evening you have already filled your head with so much useless stuff that there's no willpower left to focus on anything.

I can hear you already arguing, that how can I then know what's going on, especially if it's something important like a nuclear meltdown or the death of Michael Jackson? I use my supreme powers of Internet wizardry to circumvent this problem, which pretty much comes down to two things: I'm on Twitter and Facebook. With those two tools alone I can very well see what people are talking about. It works like an automatic news filter. Only the really important news, something that people feel strongly about, or will actually affect their lives, are the ones that will get discussed and thus brought also to my attention. You wouldn't believe how well this actually works in practice. It's almost like having a personal staff, telling you only the things you might actually have to react to in some way, or have a strong interest in.

So, if I don't follow news I must be pretty ignorant then? Not quite. I would rather say that I'm selectively ignorant. Like I said, following the so-called world news doesn't really add much value to my life. I see it as time wasted and as a distraction. So instead, I put that time into reading books and blogs focusing on topics that I care deeply about. There are also a few science news sites that I check occasionally if I have time to procrastinate, as well as sites such as Digg, Mixx, and StumbleUpon, but even with these customizable and crowdsourced sites I find the real added-value very fleeting for my purposes. 

Finland and H1N1

A good case example about how not following news pays off was the H1N1 hysteria here in Finland. I started hearing about it first from my mom, then looked into it a bit on international health sites to discover that there was not really any reason to get worried about it - less chance of getting an H1N1 infection than the seasonal flu, and even in the worst cases it seemed easily treatable with modern medicine. At the same time, however, news outlets in Finland were using fear mongering tactics; pandemic, estimates of H1N1 death toll, how especially pregnant women were at risk etc. Now consider if that was your only source of information, like it was for many people, how would it have made you feel? Scared? Panicked?

Then Finland bought 5.3 million doses of Pandemrix vaccine from GlaxoSmithKline, as recommended by The National Institute for Health and Welfare. Hallelujah! And the scare tactics had worked, too. People were actually fighting to get vaccinated. The Institute continued its campaign of fear with the help of news outlets - as most of their information came from the Institute. Latest at this point, however, some people started to become skeptical: Finland has a population of about 5 million. Was it really expected that everyone would get vaccinated? Then the best part was discovered: The National Institute for Health and Welfare had received 6 million euros from GlaxoSmithKline for 'research', and the Institute did not ask for competing offers or from any other pharmaceutics companies, but went straight for GSK's Pandemrix vaccine. If this doesn't smell fishy, then I don't know what does.

Only when the complications and side-effects of the vaccine started to become too numerous to ignore, the voice of the mainstream media started to change somewhat. Yet during the whole ordeal, a non-profit citizen activist website had published H1N1 related information from numerous sources, national and international, and as a result got even accused by The National Institute for Health and Welfare for spreading misinformation. So no matter what was happening in the rest of the world, the Finnish people are apparently expected to have blind trust.

I do not want to keep beating this death horse any further, and I definitely want to avoid all the conspiracy theories surrounding World Health Organization, the corruption in Finnish national healthcare, or how BigPharma is pushing its own agenda in the Finnish parliamentary politics etc. What I want to say, however, is that in light of these events no matter what your source is, you can't be certain that the information you get is correct. It might also be wise to consider what motivation your source might have, or who is actually funding it. Can you trust them to offer a neutral, objective view on the topic?

Despite this 'trust no one' tone of voice, I want to believe that there is a better chance at finding more accurate and objective information from specialist sites such as The New England Journal of Medicine or Mercola.com, compared to the Finnish mainstream media that seems to get its information from the aforementioned biased and possibly corrupted sources.

In the end, if I had followed the news surrounding H1N1 in Finland, I'm almost certain I would have felt a lot more anxious and worried about how the situation would play itself out. At the same time there wasn't really much I could personally have done about it, yet it would have robbed me of some of my attention, willpower, or energy - whatever you want to call it - and hindered my ability to put my mind into more important things. That to me is worth much more than finding out who won the Big Brother this year or who is our prime minister dating this time.

Finding your hidden talents

It's a beautiful ideal that each of us is born with unique talents. I've heard it said by my mother, by my old teachers, and by a number of public speakers. They all believe that you, me, and everyone else has something special to bring to the table. Something that will make us superior to the others. And guess what, I'm starting to believe that it's true. The only problem is that those talents are not so easy to figure out.

When talking about talents, most people think of the obvious ones such as being a great pianist, or a painter, or a code wizard. These talents are easy to notice, because they result in external evidence that is a direct proof of the talent of the creator. We can see a painting in a gallery and say "this artist has talent", and it makes sense. However, considering a talent to be merely a channel for creating tangible objects will limit your way of looking at talents. I think there's more than just artistic talent that needs to be taken into account.

I propose looking at talents as characteristics or aptitudes that are an integral part of who we are. More often than not these aptitudes are not so clear, especially to ourselves. I'm sure everyone has had some great teachers before, and some who were completely abysmal. What do you think was the difference between them? Maybe the great teachers had charisma, better communication skills, authority, enthusiasm... They had an understanding of how to facilitate learning. To my experience it's not that the bad teachers lack knowledge, but there seems to be an invisible wall preventing them from transferring that knowledge to the students.

A great teacher has talent in teaching. Other examples of these more subtle talents could be the people who have a knack of conflict resolution, who motivate others. Or how about those who can go and talk to anyone, and instantly create a relationship with that person. Sometimes these talents can be so integrated into our personalities that we are completely unaware of them.

Spending some time trying to discover your talents can be pretty useful. I don't know why, but most people - if not all of them - enjoy using their talents. This makes them feel appreciated, that they are doing something meaningful and congruent to their life's purpose. This comes even more clear if you've done something for work that's completely out of your character, something for which you have no talent. Letting your talents go to waste is likely to make you feel unhappy and worse about life.

Now, before you can start to actually think how to use your talents and take advantage of them, you need to know what they are. A true talent is something that should fit the following criteria:

• It is a superior ability that other people notice and value.

• You love using that ability, and want to use it as much as possible.

• Using that ability energizes you, and those around you.

• You keep getting better and better at using it, never running out of possibilities for further improvement.

It might be a tough personal challenge to find something that fits the above description. Give it time. I am only slowly starting to have some mental clarity about my own talents, and I've started to actively think about this almost a year ago. However, now that I'm getting closer to understanding what my talents are, I realize that deep inside me I've known about them for years.

A great way to gain some insight about what your talents might be is to ask. People who have known you for years, and are close to you, usually see you differently than how you see yourself. Ask them how would they describe you? What do they appreciate in you? What makes you exceptional and talented in their opinion? This can provide rather surprising revelations, because others see you as one of many people in their lives. They will compare you to those other people, and to themselves. Something that you are not able to do, as it's impossible to be objective about one's self.

I am not a big fan of quizzes, but I've found that the Myers-Briggs test can provide helpful insight into your personality and help you discover your talents. I did it myself couple weeks ago at HumanMetrics, and felt that the resulting personality type (ENFJ - the Teacher) was spot-on accurate. It also helped me see some aspects of my personality that I had taken for granted and not paid attention to before. The test helped me realize, that those parts of my personality are also a part of my talents.

If you decide to do the Myers-Briggs test and cannot relate with the results, try doing it again some other time when you're in a different state of mind. Your mood will affect your personality, and it shows in the test results as well as in real life situations. Also, the Myers-Briggs type indicator is not something static you're born with, but it changes over time as your personality develops and changes.

Everyone has talents, but finding them may take time. Don't worry about it or blame yourself for not figuring it out. If you believe that you have a talent but can't seem to be able to discover it, it's likely that sooner or later your subconscious will drop an answer in your mind and then it seems so obvious, that you can't believe why you didn't realize it sooner.

Believing is seeing

We tend to think that as civilized and well-educated people our view of the world is objective and fair. We pride ourselves in our abilities to dissect information, to make judgements based on scientific evidence, and therefore hold the belief that we are rational human beings. My mission today is to shake those beliefs. Our brains are hardwired with blind spots, and perhaps the biggest one is the conforming delusion that we, personally, don't have any.

The brain is very clever at allowing us to justify our own perceptions and beliefs as being accurate, realistic, and unbiased. This is called naive realism. We assume that other reasonable people see things the same way we do, and if they disagree with us they obviously aren't seeing things clearly. This is caused by two presuppositions: One, people who are open-minded and fair should agree with a reasonable opinion. And two, any opinion I hold must be reasonable; if it weren't, I wouldn't hold it. Therefore I can argue my opinion, tell the other side how things really are, and if they don't agree with me it must be because they are biased.

The root of the problem is, that each of us lives in a different reality. Our perception of the world is not the same. One very clear example of this is a person who believes in God. When that belief is an integrated part of a person, it is easy to see God everywhere; in the miracle of life, how elegant all the structures making life possible are, how daily events and occurrences can be explained by them being caused by the "will of God". A non-believer, on the other hand, might feel similar awe towards life, but seeks other explanations for it. This is a very clear-cut case of how beliefs shape our views of reality, but there are many less obvious differences in each and everyone of us.

A bit more subtle example is that discovered in the midsts of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Even though both sides recognized, that the other side perceives issues differently, they still held the opinion that the other side is biased while they themselves see things objectively. Both sides had a strong belief, that their own perception should be the basis for settlement.

An experiment was done where the Palestinian proposal was labeled as coming from the Israelis, and the Israeli proposal labeled as coming from the Palestinians. Israeli citizens were then asked to judge the two proposals. I think this is a staggering example of how fleeting our objectivity is, and how we are unaware of our beliefs shaping the reality: The Israelis liked the Palestinian proposal attributed to Israel more than they liked the Israeli proposal attributed to the Palestinians. So, can there be any chance for peace if your own proposal is not attractive to you when it appears coming from the other side? What chance is there, then, that the other side's real proposal is going to be attractive?

In the same way Democrats will endorse proposals coming from Republicans if they think the proposals were originally created by the Democratic Party, and vice versa. The really disturbing fact is, that neither the Israelis nor the Democrats were aware of these blind spots. They all claimed that their beliefs followed logically from their own careful study and reasoning.

Our beliefs cause us to accept only information that supports those beliefs, and to ignore anything that might disprove them. To study what factors influence decision-making, people were put into the role of jurors and had to listen to an audio re-enactment of an actual murder trial. They were then asked how they would have voted and why. Instead of considering and weighing all evidence carefully as it was presented, most people immediately constructed a story, or an image, about what had happened and then proceeded to accept only evidence that supported their story. The sooner people jumped into a conclusion, the more confident they were in their decision, and the more likely they were to vote for an extreme verdict to justify that decision.

The stronger a belief is, the more prone you are to accept only supporting information. Strong beliefs are not just ideas in your head that are under consideration and evaluation, but they are an integrated part of your personality. And in order to protect that personality, the brain will ignore disconfirming evidence. Here is a lesson for students of scientific objectivity: Because of what the mind thinks it knows, it filters information, shutting out things that don't fit in the model it has created. Seeing is not believing. Believing is seeing.

This is not just an individual phenomenon, but it's also a cultural one. Cultural intellectual patterns are built on past "facts" which are extremely selective. When a new fact that does not fit the pattern comes in, we don't throw out the pattern. We throw out the fact. Galileo was persecuted for defending the fact that the Earth revolves around the sun. For this kinds of contradictory facts it may take centuries before enough people will start to see them to cause a change in the cultural intellectual patterns.

Similar "battle" can be seen right now in the area of nutrition; the established pattern of low-fat high complex carbohydrate diet being healthy is under attack by the disconfirming evidence of health benefits of low-carbohydrate diets. Some of that evidence originates already in the 19th century. Yet only now, decades later, we are starting to see slow changes in these broader cultural intellectual patterns.

Perhaps one of the most obvious ways how beliefs influence our perception, that everyone is familiar with, is prejudice. It is the way human mind perceives and processes information into categories, or stereotypes. Having stereotypes allows us to save considerable amount of mental energy, as it means we don't need to approach every single person or situation without preconceptions. However, it also means that we see the world through a lens, or filter, consisting of those stereotypes, and as a result make erroneous conclusions.

This is also why first impressions are so important. Humans have an uncanny ability to determine a persons character rather accurately in a matter of seconds. This trait has developed as it was necessary in prehistoric times to make quick judgements about whether or not someone we encountered meant us harm. After that first impression, however, all our later experiences with that person are filtered through the image we created during the first encounter, and changing that image later takes a lot more effort.

This sort of labeling was very well documented in a study where sane people were sent to psychiatric wards, pretending that they had mental illness. Even though the pseudopatients stopped reporting any symptoms related to their "condition" immediately after being admitted, everything they did and said was interpreted by the staff through the lens of that person being a schizophrenic.

In other words, the diagnosis was in no way affected by the perception of the circumstances, but the perception of the circumstances was shaped entirely by the diagnosis. And as it turned out, this label - or image - was impossible to get rid of. Once you were labeled as a schizophrenic, the best status you could achieve was being a schizophrenic "in remission". From the institution's, or doctors', point of view you were not sane, never had been, and never would be.

I wrote this article hoping that you will become a little more aware of these blind spots that all of us have, including you and me. More importantly, though, I want to emphasize how important it really is to try to understand each other, and to relate to what the other person is thinking and feeling, instead of judging them being right or wrong. Each of us have our own perceptions of reality, and my reality is in no way better or more "right" than yours. It is simply the lens through which I see the world.

Note: To further explore these concepts, I recommend reading Mistakes were made (but not by me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson.

Evolved to eat meat: the logic of low-carb diets

If you're trying to search for information about weight loss and healthy eating it's nearly impossible to find good advice about what actually works and what doesn't. Contradictory information is everywhere; low-fat vs. high-fat, meat eating vs. vegetarianism, soy vs. dairy etc. On top of that, many diet and weight loss websites have their own agenda of selling information products or dietary supplements. Not to mention the huge number of fad diets which are supposed to make you look like a Calvin Klein model in four to eight weeks.

And here I am talking about low-carb diet, which was pretty much categorized as a fad some years ago, but now an ever-growing body of research is starting to prove otherwise. The principles behind low-carb way of eating are sound and result in better health. There is a lot of evidence that low-carb is not just another passing thing, but actually might prove to be the optimal diet plan that anyone can follow.

I have discussed the mechanics of low-carb diet in detail previously, so please refer to The how and why of weight loss article if you're interested in knowing more about what it actually is, and how and why it works. In this post I want to focus more on some of the logic and reasons of why low-carb simply makes sense.

Human species is approximately 2 million years old, and our prehuman hominid ancestors appeared on the face of Earth at least 4 million years ago. We have had all this time to evolve, to adjust to our environments, and essentially become as well-suited as possible for survival under the conditions that have existed for the past millennia - including obtaining our food by means of hunting and gathering. Agriculture, on the other hand, is only a 10,000 years old activity, yet it has drastically changed our dietary patterns.

Prior to agriculture the human diet consisted of seasonal fruits, vegetables, and meat. Dairy is also fairly new, as we developed lactose tolerance only about 7,500 years ago. In a hunter-gatherer society the amount of protein consumed was 2-5 times as much as it is today, and since plant-based foods that can be eaten raw do not contain large amounts of protein, it is safe to say that by far most of the protein came from animal sources.

The Expensive Tissue Hypothesis suggests, that it has originally been because of switching from largely plant-based diet to one that is mainly animal-based, that we have been able to develop as large brains as we have now. The brain consumes more energy than any other organ in human body, and meat has higher concentrations of energy than fruits and vegetables. Meat eating allowed our guts to reduce in size as less energy was needed for digestion. That available extra energy was then consequently put into the use of human brain which has grown to be three times the size compared to the brains of other primates.

Since the dawn of agriculture our glucid intake has increased 45-60% as we are eating grains and starch products instead of seasonal fruits and vegetables. Now pause for a moment and think: In evolutionary terms 10,000 years is a blink of an eye, yet we have brought upon us drastic nutritional changes. For 2 million years our bodies adapted to plant and meat based diet which was high in fat and protein. 10,000 years quite simply is not enough time for the necessary evolutionary changes to happen, so that we could actually operate on an optimal level while gaining most of our calories from carbohydrates. Not to mention all the highly processed foods rich in trans-fats, artificial sweeteners, and sugar that have emerged during the 20th century.

Archaeological evidence found on Egyptian mummies suggests that the switch from hunting and gathering to carbohydrate based diet has caused ailments such as tooth decay, cardiovascular disease, and obesity. Stunted bone growth caused by iron-deficiency anemia and infant mortality has also been far more common in agricultural societies compared to hunting and gathering ones.

Supporting evidence can also be found in more recent times: the Inuit peoples in Alaska have traditionally eaten a diet that consists 3-5% of carbohydrates, as their main food sources were fish, marine mammals, moose, and caribou. Despite high-fat diet obesity was almost non-existent among them, and type II diabetes was rare. In 1978, however, carbohydrates were already presenting 50% of the Inuit diet, and obesity and type II diabetes had become far more common. Similar pattern has been observed in all the other cultures that have switched from plant and meat based hunter gatherer diet to refined carbohydrates.

In light of this evidence and human evolution, we are built to work on meat and plant based diet. Yet paradoxically I'm sure everyone of us knows people who are eating fairly large amounts of carbohydrates and have no weight or health problems whatsoever. Similar to that, most of the world is still lactose intolerant. Not everyone has developed the gene that allows them to digest the complex milk sugar.

A recent LiveScience article suggested that the human evolution is actually accelerating, and the biggest recent changes are related to agriculture and its consequences. This could indicate, that some people have developed a better capability to digest and use grains and starches as an energy source. They may have also developed a better protection against associated illnesses such as type II diabetes. Similar to lactose tolerance, however, this does not apply to everyone.

And here is the catch why low-carbohydrate diets simply make sense. You probably won't know your own tolerance levels of carbohydrates, yet you have evolved on a meat and plant based diet. This means you can easily cut off carbs and sugars from your diet for at least two weeks and monitor what kind of changes that brings. The point is not to cut meals, count calories, or refrain from eating when hungry, but to simply avoid anything with sugar and carbs. Popular low-carb plans such as Protein Power and Atkins both start with a 2-week intervention period during which the carb consumption is reduced to about 20 grams a day. This period will also kickstart your metabolism to burn fat for energy instead of storing it.

And no, you can't die from lack of carbohydrates in your diet. Even though we have certain tissues that use glucose for energy, such as those in our eyes, the liver is perfectly capable of synthesizing all the glucose required.

After the first two weeks you can try gradually increasing your carbohydrate consumption while monitoring how your body feels. Each of us has different tolerances. I've found that mine is quite low, so I avoid all carbs except what I get from vegetables, youghurt, and milk curd for most of the time. Professional athletes or those doing high amounts of exercise will also have different nutritional requirements. If you're severely overweight, obese, or suffer from type II diabetes I recommend getting more information from books like Protein Power on how to gain optimal health and weight.

3 simple things for happier life

I have been very hesitant about publishing this blog post. I started writing it couple weeks ago, only to stop after getting my main points down because I felt that this will put me in the same "faceless" group of hundreds or thousands of personal development bloggers out there. Not that there's anything wrong with writing about personal development, but I felt that I needed to approach these things from my own quirky semi-scientific point of view that I've been building.

What finally made me finish this article was, that the things I discuss here have had a positive impact on my own life. And by sharing this there is always a chance to influence others and help them achieve positive results as well. 

It's all in your head

This is a big one. By simply realizing and accepting that emotions exist entirely within you, can have a life-changing effect. Let me repeat that; what you feel is entirely a creation of your own mind. Whatever happens in your life outside your own body and mind is not the source of your feelings. If you can't grasp this, then read it again until you can. Or watch the Habits of Happiness talk by Matthieu Ricard who explains the concept in more detail.

So what if you crash your car? Surely there will be all kinds of feelings of anger, anxiety and regret stemming from that accident. But can you show me which aspects of a car crash cause the negative feelings? Can you show me, that when a car crash occurs these specific feelings get created, and start to inhabit the bodies of those involved? I doubt you can, because those feelings are entirely subjective experiences of the people involved, and they are entirely their own creation. Simply put; the car crash itself does not create those feelings.

A feeling is simply a creation of your brain as it reacts to external or internal events, such as car crashes or remembering the first time you held your first-born baby in your arms. This is important. You might even want to write it down. Whatever events take place, they are not directly making you feel anything. You feel something because your mind makes you feel it.

The reason I rant about this is, that realizing it has been a hugely liberating experience. It explains why money and new toys don't bring lasting happiness; far too many people try to change internal processes by focusing on external conditions. It also gives you a degree of control over what you feel. When you know that your feeling exists only within you, independent of external events, your whole perception of that feeling changes. You may start to wonder why your mind is making you feel something, what could be causing the feeling, and what is the feeling trying to tell you? This will help you tremendously to understand yourself better.

My own understanding and control of feelings was put to a test earlier this year, when purely out of my own fault I was caught speeding, received a huge fine, and lost my driver's licence for over two months. I had learned and accepted, that the external event of being stopped by the police was not responsible for what I feel, but that I am creating those feelings inside my own mind. The feelings I have are my responsibility. Even though this whole ordeal was a huge setback for me in multiple ways, I managed to stay positive during and after the whole event.

Now imagine how much easier it is to make yourself feel positive about small annoyances that you might let bother you, such as cleaning the bathroom or washing dishes. 

Talk to yourself

This is something we all do every single day. We look ourselves in the mirror after waking up and say "Dude, you're awesome! Another great day ahead!" Or at least that's what I do :) And that is one of the reasons I'm feeling good. We have this internal dialogue going on and on all the time, and it has a huge effect on how we feel.

Have you ever paid attention to how you are talking to yourself? We have a tendency to be extremely cruel to ourselves! The way most people talk inside their heads is so negative that they would never in their right mind use that kind of language when talking to other people. This internal dialogue actually has an effect on your subconscious mind, making you feel the way you talk.

To improve this, first start paying attention to these internal dialogues and the kind of language you use. Then start shaping the dialogue consciously. How would you like to feel? I'm sure everyone wants to be happy, confident and enthusiastic most of the time. Since you will feel good or bad based on how you talk to yourself, be mindful of the words you use and make a conscious effort to have only positive self-talk going in your head. Or as Tim from Real Social Dynamics puts is; talk to yourself like you're the pimp of the world.

You can even write down or memorize a commercial for yourself, as in the below example:

Tom Staley meet Tom Staley - an important, a really important person. Tom, you're big thinker, so think big. Think Big about Everything. You've got plenty of ability to do a first-class job so do a first-class job.
Tom, you believe in Happiness, Progress and Prosperity. So: talk only Happiness, talk only Progress, talk only Prosperity.
You have lots of drive, Tom, lots of drive. So put that drive to work. Nothing can stop you Tom, nothing.
Tom, you're enthusiastic. Let your enthusiasm show through.
You look good, Tom, and you feel good. Stay that way.
Tom Staley, you were a great fellow yesterday and you're going to be an even greater fellow today. Now go to it, Tom. Go forward.
- From The Magic of Thinking Big by David J. Schwartz

How do you think the above person feels about himself, compared to someone whose internal dialogue consists of complaining how her dress looks too big on her, the shoes are wrong color, and that she should have done a much better job on that presentation for the marketing class? 

Language patterns

It is not only how we talk to ourselves, but how we talk to others that shapes our reality. If you tell someone that you're feeling a bit down, do you think that telling it will make you feel better? You're just simply giving yourself a permission to be stuck in that miserable feeling. On the other hand, even if you're feeling moody but you respond to someones "How are you?" that you feel awesome, you're actually taking a step towards feeling that way!

This is another example of how the subconscious mind is affected by the words we use. When you say - with proper tonality and enthusiasm, even if you're faking it - that you feel great, your mind starts to create that feeling. So if you want to feel more happy and content in your life, use words and phrases that carry a positive meaning.

One noteworthy thing to mention here is, that apparently our subconscious minds cannot make a difference between positive and negative phrases. So if you keep repeating in your head that "Don't feel bad, don't feel bad" your subconscious is actually registering "Feel bad, feel bad". Try to find alternative ways to say what you want without the use of negations.

I was telling a friend of mine that I have simply no talent at singing, and she actually scolded me for saying that. Our thoughts and the language we use shape our reality, so by saying that I have no talent at singing I'm actually creating a reality where I have an excuse, and I don't even need to consider ever becoming good at it. Instead, I should have said that I have a challenge in singing. Challenges can be overcome, and they can also be sources of strength.

My advice is; be mindful of the words and phrases you use, and think what kind of effect they might have on your subconscious mind. After all, you are the one creating those positive and negative feelings. No one else. So take responsibility.

A cynic might call me delusional for thinking in ways that I described, using these kinds of "tricks" and "techniques" to feel positive and happy, but guess which one of us is enjoying life more and having better time on this planet? :)

An outward look at life

In my previous post I talked about how we humans are made of trillions of smaller lifeforms such as cells and bacteria, and that those lifeforms are completely unaware that they are part of this indefinitely more complex structure we call human. If you haven't read my previous post, please read it before this one, as it provides an introduction to some of the concepts I'll be discussing here.

If the cells are aware of only other cell sized constructs, similar to us being aware of things that hold meaning to us and that exist in the world in which we operate, could it be possible that we are also just a part of a much larger organism? That organism would be indefinitely different from us and existing in a different world from ours. We would have no possible way to comprehend it or see our part in its existence.

And what if that organism has a completely different form of life than we humans do? We have defined life from our perspective, but could there be life that is so incomprehensible to us that we automatically choose to ignore or overlook it?

Take a city or a society as an example. You could say, that a city works with an intelligence of its own that is way beyond the intelligence of any single person. If there's a blackout in the city, someone knows how to fix it. There is a system for finding the person to fix it and a system to find the system that would find the person. And there is a force holding these systems together. People run the transportation systems that enable the city to operate, work on jobs without which the city - or parts of it - would fall apart, and create new constructs that shape and enhance the city. To me this sounds eerily familiar to what the cells are doing within our bodies.

Think of the way a city devours the lives of its inhabitants for its own purposes: A higher organism that is feeding upon a lower one, and by doing so accomplishing more than the lower organism can accomplish alone.

These ideas are from Robert M. Pirsig's book Lila, and Pirsig says that people have a habit of thinking that a city is a "work of man", but what man invented it? Was there a group of people who jointly decided how it should all go together? And if "man" invented societies or cities, why are all societies and cities so repressive of "man"? Why would "man" even want to invent internally contradictory standards and arbitrary social institutions for the purpose of giving himself a bad time?

We are used to think, that evolution stops with the highest evolved substance; the physical body of man. We perceive cities and societies as subordinate creations of man. But the problem with this line of thinking is, that if a city is a creation of man then the same thought pattern dictates that man is just a creation of the individual cells that constitute human body. And that those cells are a creation of protein and DNA molecules, and DNA is a creation of carbon and other inorganic atoms. In the end this line of thinking would dictate, that individual electrons contain the intelligence needed to build cities all by themselves.

If, on the other hand, you accept that there are evolutionary patterns that are not dependent on biological substance, cities start to make a whole lot more sense. When societies, cultures and cities are seen not as inventions of "man" but as higher organisms than biological man, it becomes much easier to understand the phenomena of war, genocide, and other forms of human exploitation. "Mankind" is not inherently interested in getting itself killed, but this organism that is a pattern of values superimposed on top of biological human bodies, doesn't mind losing a few bodies to protect its greater interests.

Consider the way you are expected to live your life; you study, graduate, work and then retire. And by doing that whose interests are you serving? Who is the beneficiary? It's not going to be you. Not in this modern world. More than anything it's going to be the organization that employs you. And the organization can be seen as a social organism that converts the accumulated biological energy into forms that serve itself. It uses your energy throughout your life to grow stronger, and when you have become too old and weak to be of use, it excretes you and finds another younger person full of energy to take your place and do the same thing all over again.

An inward look at life

If you think my previous post wasn't trippy enough, maybe this one is more to your satisfaction. The concepts I talk about here were inspired by Robert M. Pirsig's wonderful book Lila, as well as Richard Dawkins's TED talk The universe is queerer than we can suppose. And as a disclaimer, don't take these things seriously word-for-word, but instead stay open minded and focus on feeling what kind of thoughts they might provoke in you.

Let's look at you. What you are made of. We can start from atoms, move up to molecules and further zoom out to see the individual cells. There are trillions of them, and cells are considered as a basic form of life. There is life in you. You are not just alive as a person, but there are individual lifeforms within you, performing different functions without which you wouldn't survive.

You might not see the wondrous reality I'm trying to convey by saying these things. It can be difficult to grasp the concept of cells having a precious life of their own. But what about bacteria, clearly a form of life? Most of them aresingle-celled organisms that eat, procreate and evolve. And there are dozens of different species of bacteria living in your gastrointestinal tract alone. Do you consider them being part of you?

If you said "no, they are freeloaders or parasites," would your mind change if I told you that without those bacteria you wouldn't be able to convert nutrients into usable forms, synthesize vitamins, or eliminate toxins? You would probably die without the bacteria that is living inside you.

Your life is made possible by the lives of trillions of smaller creatures within you. And those creatures have intelligence. Not the same form as we - the more complex organisms - have developed, but intelligence nonetheless. The cells are sensing their surroundings and react to it. Think of a white blood cell destroying harmful bacteria: It has to be able to tell the harmful ones from the beneficial ones, and it has to know how to eliminate the threat. It learns and remembers. This is why we can have an immunity to a disease, and why we get vaccinated. Our cells learn to recognize a harmful pathogen and how to get rid of it.

Now imagine for a moment that you are a cell; a simple form of life living inside the body of a human being, performing your function, reacting to your surroundings, procreating and evolving. Would you be aware that you are just a tiny part of a larger and indefinitely more complex living organism? Your surroundings, the world in which you operate, is completely different from the one in which humans operate. Your sensory equipment would not be able to comprehend the world of humans, as that world has no significance for a single-cell organism like yourself.

The lifeforms you, as a human, are made of are in most likelihood unaware of your existence. They are aware of lifeforms and constructs that are more related to their own size and have meaning to them. Similar to us being aware of buildings, mountains and other people. We do not sense the bacteria in our food or on our bed sheets, but the living organisms inside us do.

Our brains have evolved in a way that helps us navigate the world in which we operate. We sense our surroundings three dimensionally because it allows us to comprehend and navigate a reality that holds meaning for us. This, however, makes it difficult for us to imagine and understand that there can be millions of variations on how different lifeforms sense their environment, including those operating in the world consisting of cell-sized constructs.

A dog, for example, may sense smells in a completely different way from how our brains interpret them. Maybe their brains convert the smells into three dimensional images the same way our brains convert the light that hits our eyes into shapes and colors. Have you considered that before? We do not "see" in a direct sense of the word. Our brains decode the signals from our optic nerves and project the interpreted and decoded reality outwards. In other words, what you see is an image created by your brain using the light that hits your retinas as a reference.

Now, I think this post has enough food for thought already as it is, so I'll leave it at that. However, this was meant as more of an introduction to another, perhaps even more trippy topic which I'll try to cover in my next post. And as always, your comments and thoughts are highly appreciated!

Are we lost in our heads?

We are currently living the high point of human evolution, and every single day is the next high point as our knowledge and understanding is constantly increasing. As little as 50 years ago people wouldn't have believed if you told them about how the whole world will be interconnected, and how vast amounts of information are available at practically everyone's fingertips.

We have put man on the moon, explored the deep seas and created magnificent works of art. The increase in humanity's understanding of ourselves and the world we inhabit has been phenomenal, and never before have we glimpsed so deeply into how our bodies and minds work.

However, this increase in knowledge and the culture that values intelligence more than anything else has caused another kind of change in us; we have began to live our lives inside our heads. You might have a differing opinion of this, but I have started to notice that when people say "me" they mean their mind, their personality, their character. They are excluding the physical body from the concept of "me". I believe it's very common these days to refer to "my body" as something that's separate from "me", and consider it more like a possession instead of an integral part of your being.

Like Ken Robinson put it when talking about university professors; for them the body is just a means of transportation for the mind.

Ever since reading The Vegetarian Myth I have been bugged by a question that Lierre asked, but didn't really answer properly in the book: As it seems evident that agriculture is both destroying the planet and our health, why did we start doing it in the first place? What caused humanity to make the switch from hunting and gathering to farming?

I have been thinking, that maybe this polarization - or separation - of body and mind started already before we made the switch, and it was actually one of the underlying reasons for inventing agriculture.

I find it really disturbing, that we have become so alienated from our bodies and our physical needs, that we have no idea anymore about what is good and healthy for us. The low-fat high-carb vs. low-carb high-fat battle is the perfect example of this. It does not matter which approach is the key to eating healthy, or maybe it's neither of those two, but how have we ended up in this situation in the first place?

Does a lion spend time thinking whether or not eating a zebra is healthy for it? Or do koalas consider that maybe it would be a good idea to try something else than eucalyptus leaves for a change? No, their whole being is hardwired to eat what works the best for them. They do not rationalize like we humans do. Instead, they listen and hear and do what their bodies tell them is the right thing to do.

I am not saying that rational thinking is the cause of all evil and should be abandoned, but at least on a personal level I want to re-establish the connection between mind and body, and come to accept that they are interconnected in more levels than I can imagine. One does not exist without the other, and the body is not just a dumb, automated vessel that gets your mind around to different places, but instead it has a profound effect on how well the mind actually works.

This is something I noticed very clearly when I started my own low-carb diet; the increase I experienced in my energy levels and positive attitude surpassed all my expectations! This connection works both ways too: A 2007 study [PDF] found that a group of athletes who visualized exercising their hip muscles experienced similar strength gains as the control group who went to the gym and did the actual exercises.

There is a lot more to our bodies and minds than we realize. Instead of getting more and more stuck in the mind, I think everyone should practice listening and interpreting the signals that the body is sending. On a deep level you - your body and mind, together - know what is the right thing to do. If that inner knowledge wouldn't exist, human species would have become extinct already thousands of years ago.

10 things you didn't know about soy

Still a few months ago I had the impression, that soy is healthy and good for you. After all, in my reality it's the food that health-conscious vegetarians eat in vast quantities as a replacement for animal protein. As we know, soy is being used to create all kinds of alternatives to animal products; there are soy burgers, hot dogs, milk etc. Soy protein is also used in many different supplements.

Like so many other assumptions I've had, this one went down the drain after I became more interested in nutrition and health, and started to actually read about stuff. So here are 10 things you probably don't know about soy, and after reading this I hope you'll at least consider twice whether or not to feed a soy-based infant formula to your child.

1) Soy contains numerous chemical toxins

High levels of phytic acid in soy reduce assimilation of multiple micronutrients, and is not neutralized by ordinary preparation methods such as soaking, sprouting and long, slow cooking. High phytate diets have caused growth problems in children.

Trypsin inhibitors in soy interfere with protein digestion, cause pancreatic disorders, and is known to have caused stunted growth in test animals. This is also the reason why eating soy may cause gas, bloating, pain and diarrhea.

Soy phytoestrogens disrupt the endoctrine function and may cause infertility and breast cancer.

Thyroid hormone is one of the key metabolic controllers in human body, and the soy phytoestrogens are potent antithyroid agents that cause hypothyroidism (meaning, that the body is unable to produce sufficient amounts of thyroid hormone) and may cause thyroid cancer. In infants, consumption of soy formula has been linked to autoimmune thyroid disease.

Soy foods contain high amounts of aluminum which is toxic to the nervous system and the kidneys.

Processed soy foods contain toxic lysinoalanine and highly carcinogenic nitrosamines. Free glutamic acid or MSG, a potent neurotoxin, is also formed during soy food processing and additional amounts are added to many soy foods.

2) Soy increases your need for vitamins

Vitamin B12 analogs in soy cannot be absorbed and used by human body, and actually increase the body's requirement for B12. Soy also increases your need for vitamin D, which is rather difficult to get enough already. Especially here in Nordics.

3) Soy has been used to kill sex drive

Monks in Asia have been eating tofu because it helped them keep their vows of sexual abstinence, and wives in Japan have been known to feed it to their husbands in order to reduce their virility.

Soy inhibits the production of testosterone and animal tests have shown that phytoestrogens cause lowered sperm counts, infertility and nipple discharge. In fact, the World Health Organization has spent $5 million to investigate potential natural contraceptives in order to find something safer than the birth control pill, but came out empty handed because the side effects of "natural" methods proved similar and equally serious as those of the pill.

4) Soy has never been a staple in any traditional diet

In areas where soy foods have been eaten for hundreds of years (e.g. China and Japan), soy has been used as a condiment and consumed in very small amounts that equal to less than ten grams a day.

Only in areas of famine has soy been used as a protein source.

5) Fermentation is the only proper way to prepare soy

No other preparation method, including the chemical methods used these days to create processed soy foods, will disable the trypsin inhibitors in soy.

6) Soy is safe only in very small amounts

In a study done on healthy Japanese adults, it was found that even thirty grams of soy for thirty days was enough to provoke thyroid disruptions.

7) Soy is extremely dangerous for children

A typical soy formula used to feed infants contains 38mg of isoflavones a day. That's equal to eating three to five birth control pills.

The effects of soy-based infant formula range from structural changes in the brain to reproductive system and genital abnormalities. Soy has also been linked to accelerated brain aging, diminished cognitive ability and Alzheimer's disease.

8) Soy used to be an industrial material

Before it became part of the health-food craze, soy was grown for its oil which was used to make paint and glue. Soy protein concentrate has been used to make cardboard.

9) Soy milk is a highly processed product

First the beans are soaked in an alkaline solution and then cooked under pressure. In the process the important nutrients in the beans are damaged and a toxin called lysinoalanine is created. An enzyme in soy called lipoxygenase oxidizes its polyunsaturated fats, which is the cause for the unpleasant taste and odor of soy milk.

The final solvent has to be fortified by adding calcium and vitamin D2, which is a synthetic form of vitamin D that may cause hyperactivity, coronary heart disease and allergic reactions.

In order to keep all these substances together the milk has to be emulsified and stabilized. This is done by using titanium oxide, a mineral pigment used also in white paint. There is nothing natural in soy milk.

10) Soy "meat" products are stuff of nightmares

These foods are made from textured soy protein (TSP), soy protein concentrate (SPC) and soy protein isolate (SPI).

TSP is made from soy flour, which is first defatted using high temperatures and a hexane solution. The resulting paste is put under such extreme heat and pressure that the chemical structure of the soy protein is changed in the process and toxins are formed. Colors, flavorings and sweeteners are added to the mixture.

The edible SPI is derived from defatted soy flour using an alkaline solution followed by an acid bath. The precipitated protein-curd is collected and separated from the whey by centrifuge. The curd is usually neutralized with alkali to form the sodium proteinate salt before drying.

SPC is the main ingredient in soy-based infant formula. It is created from defatted soybean meal, mixed with a caustic alkaline solution to remove the fiber, and then washed in an acid solution to precipitate out the protein. The protein curds are then put through another alkaline solution and spray dried at extremely high temperatures. This process destroys some of the amino-acids while rendering others toxic and carcinogenic.

To turn the result into something edible, the SPC is again put under a highly alkaline solution, more pressure and heat extrusion, acid bath, and finally it is mixed with the various binders, gums, fats, flavors and sweeteners. The resulting soy protein fibers are not much different from plastic fibers.

The end product contains toxins such as lysinoalanine and nitrosamine. The former causes liver damage and is known to be both carcinogenic and mutagenic. The latter causes problems ranging from kidney damage to mineral deficiences. 100 grams of soy protein contains 35 times the levels of nitrosamine considered safe.

Resources:

Weston A. Price Foundation

Soy Online Service

Why is it so hard to admit errors?

"I was wrong and take full responsibility." Don't you just love to hear someone say these words? And how do you feel when you hear them being uttered? Do you think about the person who says them that "boy, what a failure he is for making a mistake in a situation like this!", or would your first reaction be more along the lines of "boy, he actually sincerely admitted his mistake! What a generous guy!"?

I stopped watching news and reading newspapers (perhaps more about the reasons for that in another blog post) already few months ago, but even I haven't been able to avoid hearing about the election funding scandal here in Finland. Apparently one of the largest political parties received funding by rather shady means and it seems rather obvious, that bribery and lobbying was exercised in large extent to the personal gain of certain politicians.

As an avid non-follower of news I do not have the exact details of the scandal, but when I googled about it my expectations were confirmed: Not a single politician has stood up, told the public what exactly happened, and most importantly taken responsibility for the mistakes that they made in the funding process.

Do you think doing so would be a political suicide? I disagree. Even though people tend to be cynical and do not put much trust on large institutions - or good lord, political parties - underneath they have a genuine hunger for honesty and integrity.

In 1961 John F. Kennedy invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, which turned out to be a disaster due to faulty intelligence and claims from his military advisers. What he said to the public, however was that an error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it... Without debate, without criticism, no administration and no country can succeed - and no republic can survive. The final responsibility for the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion was mine, and mine alone.

You think people would have wanted Kennedy's head on a silver platter for making such a big mistake - much bigger and with much more serious possible consequences than the current Finnish scandal? On the contrary, after admitting the error Kennedy's popularity soared! Disclosing that one in a position of power can be wrong has a humanizing and trust building effect.

It does not matter whether or not you make mistakes; you need to be able to suck it up, admit your errors and take responsibility. And no, it does not mean coming up with excuses like "I dropped the glass because it was very slippery and sun was in my eyes," or that "I didn't stop at a stop sign because I was in a hurry". Just say that "I dropped the glass. It was my fault, my mistake." No excuses!

Kennedy did not just admit that a mistake had been made, but he took corrective measures reorganizing the intelligence system and became more critical to the claims of his advisers. In Finland some corrective measures have also been taken after the scandal, but unfortunately we do not have a big enough person who would tell the public the truth and admit the mistakes.

Sometimes it is extremely difficult to admit your errors. Especially if they go strongly against your self-image. In these situations we have a habit of justifying our mistakes by blaming others, or even refusing to admit that a mistake was made in the first place. This is called cognitive dissonance, and is well documented in psychology. For example, if a politician with a strong sense of personal integrity is found to have taken bribes, it is more likely that he will downplay the situation, find a scapegoat or start blaming the media (or his political opponents) for setting him up instead of admitting that he had made a bad judgment call.

No matter how hard it is, I want you to think about some mistake you have made and say to yourself "yes, I was wrong. No excuses. It was my fault." If there is some other person involved in your mistake, then call them and admit it, or confess to your loved one who knows about the incident even though he or she might have nothing to do with it.

When you are forced to face your own mistakes and take responsibility, it can be an exhilarating and liberating experience. Other people will like you more, as you prove that you are a person with high integrity and values. There is also a good chance that you will eventually get caught on your mistake, so it's much better and easier to admit it when it's still a sapling instead of a full-grown tree with roots that run deep.

A great nation is like a great man;
When he makes a mistake, he realizes it.
Having realized it, he admits it.
Having admitted it, he corrects it.
He considers those who point out his faults
as his most benevolent teachers.
- Lao Tzu

We have failed to fail

One common topic of discussion we have had this fall at the Aalto Entrepreneurship Society events is how fear of failure is one of the biggest obstacles stopping people from starting their own businesses. Some are concerned about their financial security and what would happen if the business fails, but on the other hand the steps that can be taken to minimize the financial impact of failure are rather simple. For example; don't quit your day job until you have some idea about the feasibility of your business, and make sure you have enough savings to last 6-12 months with no other source of income.

I dare say, that the financial side is not the real issue here. It is the culture, especially here in Finland. It is the fear of how others will see you if your business fails; the social pressure. We do not have a culture that celebrates those who try and fail - frankly, in Finland the ones who try and succeed are probably hated even more. Jealousy runs deep in our veins.

It is easy for the government to say "we need more entrepreneurs", but much harder to change peoples attitudes towards those who take the leap to pursue their dreams. So it is not very hard to see why we have so few truly ambitious startups.

Why is it then such a taboo to fail? I think the problem can be traced back to the way we have been educated. Ever since the first grade we have been taught that there are only two types of answers; the right and the wrong. And if you don't have the right answers you will be scowled at by your teacher and by your parents, you will not be successful, you will not get into a good university and you will end up having an unappreciated job.

From a very young age you are conditioned to provide the answers you think the other party (your teacher, boss, or parent) wants to hear instead of just having a go at it, and trying to come up with alternative options. Your brain becomes more of an information silo where everything is organized and filed to provide off-the-shelf answers. In the process, however, you also start to lose your creativity, and the ability to form new connections between different ideas and information.

The reason I brought up entrepreneurship at the start of this post is, that the capability for creative thinking is where the money is made. The vast majority of people only have generic answers that every single one of their peers have also learned at school or by following what others are doing. Successful entrepreneurs, by nature, have a different view on the world. They are the ones who have the creative ability to combine apparently unrelated things into something wonderful.

Every year worldwide more and more people are graduating with university degrees, so how are you going to differentiate yourself from them? Why should a company hire you when so many others have exactly the same education? Is it a wonder, that the most valued employees today are those who can come up with creative solutions and make them happen?

In one of my all-time favorite TED talks, Ken Robinson is making a case about how difficult it is to teach children in the modern world when it is changing at such a rapid pace. How can you educate someone who starts school now and will enter working life in 15-20 years? How do you know how the world is in 20 years when you can't even tell what it looks like in 5 years? And yet you are supposed to provide education that prepares for this unpredictable future.

With so much uncertainty it is even more important to nurture creativity, and to get rid of this mentality of right and wrong answers. We simply do not know yet what the future challenges will be, so the best tool to face those challenges is the extraordinary human capacity for creative thinking.

Failing at something should be celebrated instead of frowned upon, and the mindset that we need is not how to avoid failures, but how to learn from them. Anyone who has ever studied or tinkered with something on their own knows that the best way to learn is to actually do it, make a mistake, find out what went wrong and learn how to avoid it the next time. Unfortunately, the current form of education is not cultivating this approach.

The brain is like a muscle, creating new neural pathways the more you use it and the more you apply what you know in different ways. Intelligence is not a static quality you're born with, but something you can nurture. You won't, however, be giving your brain the exercise it needs by simply memorizing information that someone else has prepared for you. Don't be so concerned about being right or wrong, but instead have the courage to take a shot and be creative!

"An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field."
- Niels Bohr, Nobel Prize winning physicist

Is having a passion really that important?

Based on my experience so far, most of the entrepreneurial personal development books are about "finding your passion" - or defining your biggest interest in life, and then focus on how to turn that passion into a source of income. The goal, of course, is that you could do the thing you love and in the process earn a living. It's a splendid goal to have, don't get me wrong, but is it realistic?

The books usually offer you questions and techniques to find that passion, such as:

• What activity would you do for free, just because you are passionate about it?

• What activity would you pay to do, just because you enjoy it so much?

• If you would win in a lottery and never had to work again, what would you do?

• What would you be willing to do for the rest of your life?

• Who are the people you admire and most want to be like? What interests do they have?

• What specifics do you enjoy? It could be people, computers, working with your hands, teaching, inventing or any kind of combination of multiple things.

The answers that stem from asking these questions would then indicate what your deepest interests and passions are. I actually do believe, that for some people these questions can be helpful and provide valid answers, but then again I also believe that you need to be rather passionate by nature - or able to feel more deeply about things - to really gain some insight from these questions.

You see, I wouldn't call myself a passionate person and that is a problem with exercises like this. I like riding motorcycles, I like snowboarding, I enjoy doing works of art and I am interested in reading and learning. But is any of these activities something I would consider a passion and could not imagine living without? Not really. In some cases it's almost the opposite. I don't believe I would enjoy life that much if most of my time was spent tinkering with Photoshop or reading books.

Another problem is that people change. It's a cliché but it's true. As a teenager being a snowboarder was my identity. It wasn't just something I wanted to do, it was me! It was not only about doing the actual activity, it was the music I listened to, the clothes I wore, the friends I kept, the magazines I read. It was a complete lifestyle and I enjoyed it. Fast forward 6-7 years and I hardly hit the slopes during winter. Not that I wouldn't want to, but there are now other things in my life and snowboarding has lost its importance.

Would you be willing to make a commitment to some passion of yours for the next 5-10 years? Are you sure that your interests won't change in that time?

I have been struggling with these questions since I first became aware of them. I can only identify things I like, but not really things that I'm truly and deeply passionate about. There are also quite a few things I imagine I would have a deep interest in, such as architecture, industrial design and medicine, but the realist in me does not see any options to even verify if that actually is the case; I don't have talent at drawing, and even if I'd get in a medical school it would take six full years before I'd be able to find out whether or not being a doctor is what I want.

The best advice I've come across is to simply be open-minded and try anything that appears interesting. You think gardening might be fun? Go to the library and read a bit more about it. Does it appear even more exciting as your knowledge increases? How about setting a small garden to your yard or balcony or getting a summer job taking care of a public park? Still enjoying it, or is it starting to lose its appeal?

With this approach, passions are seen more as temporary - although quite likely very strong and all-encompassing - interests, and the idea is to pursue whatever excites you at the time while also accepting the fact, that at some point the interest might start to lose its appeal. When that happens, it's not a fault in your character and you shouldn't blame yourself for "not knowing who you are anymore", but instead start the process from the beginning and perhaps find something else that captures your interest.

I would love to hear from people about how they have found their passions, and not just the fleeting ones, but the ones that have stuck for years and are still going strong. How did you discover them, and how do you feel about them? Have your feelings changed over time? Have you thought about ways to turn your passion into a source of income?

Food, justice and sustainability

This is the holy trinity around which Lierre Keith's new book The Vegetarian Myth revolves. I have to say, that I have read a dozen incredibly good books this year alone, but none of them matches the importance of this one. The Vegetarian Myth is not only a joy to read, but its message should be heard by anyone who eats.

Keith was a vegan for 20 years, driven by compassion and her drive for kindness and justice towards all living creatures. In the process, however, the vegan diet destroyed her health: Six weeks from becoming one, she had hypoglycemia. Three months into it and she stopped menstruating, was constantly exhausted and cold. Her "skin was so dry it flaked, and in the winter it itched so badly it kept [her] up at night." In two years she developed a degenerative joint disease which eventually reached her spine, and later gastroparesis which lead to fourteen years of constant nausea. On top of the physical ailments there was also depression and anxiety, for which she puts most of the blame on the vegan diet.

You would think, that the book is about what the vegetarians eat, but I would say its main focus is on how to grow food that is rich in nutrients, sustainable and with compassion towards other living creatures. And, as Keith constructs piece by piece, that the vegetarian assumption that agriculture can feed the world is a misconception.

One of the carrying themes of The Vegetarian Myth is that agriculture is actually the most destructive thing humans have done to this planet. Entire ecosystems have been destroyed to obtain more land for annual monocrops (wheat, corn, soy...), and the real heart-wrenching issue is that growing annual monocrops cannot be done sustainably: it destroys topsoil, and without topsoil, rich in nutrients and bacteria, plants won't grow and eventually the land will turn into a desert.

This is an acute problem, too. According to Keith the topsoil in North America is only inches deep, down from the twelve feet it used to be. And the only reason why agriculture is still possible to such extent is through the use of fossil fuel, turned into fertilizers. When we run out of oil, there will not only be an energy crisis, but a food crisis as well.

Keith also discusses the history of agriculture and the related politics. How this situation of factory farming has come to be, how it is controlled just by a couple huge companies, how it destroys societies in developing countries etc. All of which proves interesting reading about what happens behind the scenes of getting the food on your plate.

In fact, even the modern dietary guidelines such as the food pyramid - built to endorse low-fat diet and complex carbohydrates - are simply serving the business interests of large corporations producing cheap grain. According to Keith, hundreds of millions of public dollars were spent on five huge studies that tried to link dietary fat intake and coronary heart disease. All of them failed to prove causality. Did this stop the endorsement of low-fat, complex carbohydrate diet? No.

Phil Handler, the president of the National Academy of Scientists even asked Congress, "What right has the federal government to propose that the American people conduct a vast nutritional experiment, with themselves as subjects, on the strength of so very little evidence that it will do them any good?" Yet here we are. Low-fat craze has spread from The U.S. to the rest of the world and obesity related illnesses such as diabetes are on the rise.

Although the majority of the book is about sustainable and morally justified food production, as well as the nature of nature - how nutrients flow from plants to grazers to carnivores and back to the plants - it also contains a very good chapter about nutrition, explaining in detail what is wrong with the vegetarian diet and what kind of food humans have evolved to eat.

This chapter provides a great starting point if you just want to find out more about how different foods affect your body. The Vegetarian Myth was published in 2009 so it contains very recent information. This chapter is heavily based on more recent research about nutrition and on bestselling books such as Protein Power Lifeplan and Good Calories, Bad Calories. After reading just this one chapter you will know more about nutrition than 95% of people, and from there it's easy to move into more specific books in case you want more information.

In my opinion the only drawback of The Vegetarian Myth is its last chapter about how to save the world. It is the weakest one in argumentation and heavily colored by feminist ideology. However, all the other chapters make reading this book more than worth your while.

I understand, that this book can and will cause strong resistance especially in vegetarians, but it could have been also written from any other point of view, without diminishing the importance its message; that agriculture is not sustainable and that something has to die for another creature to live. It is only natural, that Keith uses her own experiences as a vegan to carry the narrative forward.

I can't recommend enough that you read this book. And to get a bit better idea of its contents, check the below clip from Keith's book tour talk, and read the first few pages of the book.

The how and why of weight loss

Even before I actually got started with this blog, I knew I had to do a post about weight loss. I like watching the reactions of people who see me for the first time since last winter. That is, if they even recognize me. From the late February to the beginning of April I had lost 4.7kg's of body fat, bringing my overall weight to below 80kg (I'm 183cm tall) for the first time in some 7-8 years. Since April I have continued getting leaner. And yes, I said body fat.

First let me give a little background information: I had always been fairly active, going to gym, running, cross country skiing, playing squash and rigorously practicing Kung Fu. Then in 2006 I had my student exchange in Malaysia and the active lifestyle just buzzed out. When I came back to Finland I had already gained quite a bit of weight. And I had lost my drive to exercise as well.

South Korea, August 2008

I kept gaining on weight and getting in worse shape until late 2008 when I realized that this is not who I want to be. I got a gym membership and started exercising again 4-5 times a week. I managed to keep this level going for 3-4 months, and even though I felt a little bit better about myself I did not really see any changes in my physique. That was depressing.

It became more evident day by day that my approach was wrong. I had always thought that exercise would help me lose the growing belly, but it didn't seem to have any impact at all. So when I stumbled upon this article about weight loss I thought what the heck. Might as well try it since I have nothing to lose. That was the beginning.

One thing I have to mention at this point is, that I don't consider what I did as a diet. For me it was a lifestyle change. I was aware from the start, that if I wanted to achieve results and keep them, I couldn't go back to my previous way of eating. So, if you want to start this, keep in mind that it's not a "12 week program" or anything you can just go through, then get back to your unhealthy eating habits and expect the weight loss to be permanent. 

What to avoid?

This is actually so simple, that you might be inclined to think that there's no possible way it could work. There is only one thing you need to keep in mind and that is to avoid sugar. There. The real problem is, that many things we eat are changed into sugar by our bodies. And another thing that counts is how fast they get changed. Can you see where I'm heading to? Yep. Carbohydrates.

These are the things you should not eat:

• "White" carbohydrates (rice, pasta, potatoes, bread and anything else made of grains)

• Sweets (cookies, candy, chocolate etc.)

• Sugary drinks (fruit juices, sodas etc.)

In addition to the things to avoid there are also a few things that should be eaten in moderation:

• Fruit (I'll explain why later)

• Dairy (Cheese is fine, but e.g. milk contains enough carbohydrates that I only use it with coffee. Flavored yoghurts are sugar bombs so eat only natural yoghurt.)

All in all, what should happen in your diet is that protein intake increases somewhat, fat intake increases quite a bit but carbohydrate intake goes much lower - and the carbohydrates that you eat come from sources that are rich in nutrients, such as vegetables and fruit. 

...And what to eat?

Minced meat, mozzarella cheese, beans and mixed vegetables

I can see the question starting to form in your mind; what is there left to eat anymore? I'll admit that in the beginning I, too, had problems figuring that out every now and then. The biggest problems for me were breakfast and snacking. I have experimented with different foods quite a bit, and here's what I have settled in:

Drinks

• Water

• Coffee

• Tea (normal tea and unsweetened iced tea)

• Sugarfree soda (these contain enough artificial substances that you should not drink a lot of them)

• Beer, wine (only occasionally, and a maximum of one small bottle or glass a day)

Breakfast

• Boiled eggs (I bought an egg-cooker for this, which has proved useful)

• Few slices of salami

• A bit of cheese (occasionally)

• Tomatoes

• Fruit (occasionally)

Snacks

• Almonds and nuts

• Natural yoghurt

• Cheese

• Salami

• Eggs

• Finnish quark (or curd, I'm not entirely sure of the English translation)

• Fruit

Sausage, bacon and mixed vegetables

I usually have lunch at a restaurant, but I'm mindful about the things I eat, so my lunch tends to consist of plenty of vegetables, possibly legumes and some meat. Below is the list of some of the ingredients I regularly mix if I am cooking my own dinner or lunch:

• Protein (eggs, sausages, chicken, turkey, beef, pork, fish etc.)

• Frozen vegetables (I've found these to be incredibly handy when cooking my own food)

• Fresh vegetables (used mostly when I'm making salads)

• Dairy (cottage cheese, mozzarella, feta etc. but used in small portions alongside other protein sources)

• Legumes (peas and beans)

When I started to drop carbohydrates and sugar from my diet, I increased my portion sizes significantly. Earlier I would've had some bread for breakfast, a large cooked lunch at work, a small snack in the afternoon (bread or yoghurt, maybe a little chocolate) and again some bread for dinner. Now I doubled or even tripled the amount of meat I had during lunch and took a huge plate of salad to go with it, and when I earlier had just one warm meal a day, now I started cooking large dinners with vegetables, meat and legumes.

I noticed, that it is very important to add legumes to your food if you're feeling hungry or low on energy. Vegetables do not contain much calories so legumes are necessary to ensure that you are getting enough of them. Even after eating a huge lunch it was not uncommon for me to have some 150-200g of meat with 200-300g of vegetables and 200g of beans for dinner.

There are couple more things I'd like to add: Do not eat right before going to sleep. Give at least couple hours for the food to digest, or otherwise your body will store more of it in fat cells. Always eat breakfast and always eat when you're feeling hungry. Breakfast is important to get your metabolism back on track. During the night your body has gone into "starvation mode" and continues to preserve energy unless you send it a signal in the morning that food is again available. Hunger, on the other hand, is your body telling you that it requires nutrition. This diet is about working with your body instead of against it, and if you follow the advice I have given, you can eat as much as you want while still be losing weight. 

Exceptions and happy fun times

Now that you have some idea about what to eat, let's talk about exceptions. Even if you follow this diet you can still enjoy all the food in the world and indulge yourself to whatever vices you might have. The key is not to do it all the time. If you are on a holiday, don't stress about what to eat and consequently drive people crazy. Just enjoy yourself, and when you are back home continue with the diet.

It has been already seven months since I changed my own eating habits, and from the beginning I have been keeping a practice of taking a day off once a week. During this day I indulge myself excessively; eating donuts, chocolate, ice cream, cookies, pizza, burgers and whatever it is that I want to. Usually this day follows a night of clubbing, as I'm already getting started by having a few beers the night before.

People tend to wonder how I can still lose weight while eating all these sweets. Sounds crazy, but it works. One theory is, that if you get this kind of massive burst of calories, it will prevent the thyroid from adjusting your metabolism to burn less of them. Studies have shown, that people on low carbohydrate diets tend to automatically adjust themselves to eat less calories, as the diet is rich on nutrients and keeps you satiated longer.

Another time when I purposefully increase my carbohydrate intake is within 2 hours after exercise. This is done to restore the high muscle stores of glycogen, a body fuel that is essential for high-level performance and gets depleted during intense exercise. At these times I consume more starch and sugar. Usually I eat some Finnish curd with yoghurt and fruits immediately post-exercise, and a larger meal of pasta and meat about an hour later. 

This can't possibly work...

So here I am telling you that you should stop eating the foods that form the base of the food pyramid. Not only that, but I'm also telling you to eat more foods that contain fat - especially saturated fat. This will most likely go against most of the common sense conceptions that you have about nutrition, but bear with me and read along. After all, it used to be common sense that Sun rotates around Earth, too.

This is what Drs. Michael and Mary Dan Eades say about insulin: "[It] regulates blood sugar... It controls the storage of fat, it directs the flow of amino acids, fatty acids, and carbohydrate to the tissues, it regulates the liver's synthesis of cholesterol, it functions as a growth hormone, it is involved in appetite control, it drives the kidneys to retain fluid, and much, much more." In other words, insulin is very likely the most important hormone when it comes to your metabolism.

As stated above, insulin controls nutrient storage and its main purpose is to get excess sugar, amino acids and fats out of the blood and into the cells. In the context of this article, the take-away message is that the higher your insulin levels, the more inclined your body is to store nutrients as fat. And notice, that I said "nutrients" instead of "fat". Our bodies will turn the excess protein and carbohydrate into fat. You can eat all the no-fat or low-fat food in the world and still accumulate body fat! On the other hand, lower insulin levels promote the usage of stored fat, leading to weight loss.

So, the key factor is this: control the insulin levels! Insulin is produced by pancreas as a consequence of a rise in blood sugar, which is a consequence of eating. What matters, though, is how much insulin is produced. And as you might have already guessed, the more there is sugar in your blood, the more your pancreas has to produce insulin, and the more your body will store that energy instead of burning it.

So why am I telling you to stop eating foods that are rich in carbohydrates? Because those foods are - in essence - sugar, leading to elevated insulin levels. Meat, fish, vegetables etc. on the other hand are digested slowly and contain very little sugar, or none at all. As a result your blood sugar levels will stay more stable, reducing the amount of insulin needed. Not only that, but the slower digestion means you will also feel satiated for longer.

In other words; fat does not make you fat. The real culprit that causes your body to store fat is sugar - disguised as carbohydrates. Cut that from the equation while leaving fat and protein, and your body will not only happily use the dietary fat for energy, but it will also start burning the fat stored in fat cells. And don't worry, humans do not need dietary carbohydrate at all. Our cells are able to make all the sugar that is required.

This is the reason why I mentioned earlier, that fruits should be eaten in moderation. Especially the sweet ones, as they contain higher amounts of fructose - natures own sugar, which also causes the insulin levels to rise. On the other hand, fruits do contain a high amount of important micronutrients (e.g. vitamins and minerals) so by all means eat them, but as I said, in moderation.

There are also other health benefits in addition to weight loss that are connected with steady insulin levels. Eating a diet that is high in sugar and carbohydrates will cause the insulin levels to go up and down like a roller coaster, as our bodies have a tendency to overcompensate a rise in blood sugars. When the insulin levels vary a lot from high to low - as is normal with low-fat high-carbohydrate diet - the insulin receptors will get damaged over time and lose their sensitivity. This causes a condition called insulin resistance, in which your body will end up producing more and more insulin to control the blood sugar levels. Not unlike drug addicts needing larger and larger doses as they get used to their hallucinogenic of choice.

When you have insulin resistance, an increase in blood sugar will be countered by too much insulin. By the time that excess insulin is absorbed your blood sugars have already gone too low (the job of insulin is to get sugar out from blood and into the cells, remember?). This is called hypoglycemia. A band-aid cure to get blood sugars back to a sufficient level is to eat another dose of... sugar! That will help for an hour or two, but as you know by now, the body will again respond by producing too much insulin. Eventually the blood sugar levels crash again and the whole process starts over.

At some point comes a time when your pancreas simply cannot produce enough insulin to meet the demands of the desensitized insulin receptors, resulting in chronic excess sugar. This is when you get to experience your very own slice of adult onset diabetes, or type II diabetes; a disease that has reached epidemic levels according to the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Not only that, high insulin levels are also the primary cause of, or significant risk factor for heart disease, elevated cholesterol, high blood pressure, blood clotting problems, colon cancer (and a number of other cancers), gout, sleep apnea, obesity... The list goes on.

We humans have evolved to eat meat. For millions of years we have found nutrition as hunter-gatherers, with most of the food coming from animal sources that are rich in protein and saturated fats. Agriculture and the resulting increase in carbohydrate consumption took place only about 10 000 years ago, which is not a long enough time for evolution to adjust our metabolism to be better suited for eating grains.

Civilization has been said to have born when humans learned agriculture, but so did the diseases of civilization: The mummified remains of ancient Egyptians have been found to indicate worn teeth, gum disease, obesity, cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure and heart attacks. And this did not just happen to the Egyptians, but wherever people changed from a high-protein to high-carbohydrate diet they became less healthy. This pattern is so predictable, that archaeologists use bone and teeth to identify whether a prehistoric society consisted of farmers or hunter-gatherers. Excellent, non-decayed teeth, and strong, dense and long bones tell the story of hunter-gatherers, whereas decayed teeth and frail, deformed bones are the signs of an agriculturist. 

What about exercise?

It has been touted everywhere, that low-fat diet and lots of exercise will make you fit. That's what I thought, too, but as I said in the beginning of this article; I did exercise 4-5 times a week and ate low-fat food, yet I did not see any changes in my physique. My weekly exercise regime consisted mainly of two 45-60 minute sessions of weight training and two or three 60 minute sessions of cardiovascular activity such as running, squash or cross training.

After starting with the diet, I also changed my exercise regime. For the first two months or so I only went to the gym once every 4-5 days and did 30-40 minutes of full-body resistance training. Later, I added one day of cardiovascular training in between the gym workouts. This was usually a one-hour session of squash, or going for a high-intensity interval run. In pure numbers I ended up spending about 1/3 of the time exercising compared to what I did before. And guess what? I started to see results too.

However, before you start thinking about lifting weights and jogging, there is something I need to tell you: exercise won't help you lose weight. You will burn more calories when exercising, that is true, but according to recent research exercise also stimulates hunger, so you will be eating more and end up where you started. I am not saying you should ignore exercise altogether, as it will bring numerous health benefits. Weight loss just isn't one of them. 

Final words

China, April 2009

Every now and then I imagine what my life would be like if I hadn't discovered what I now know about nutrition. I would probably weight closer to 90kg's and feel rather miserable. It is amazing how big an impact the food you eat has not just on your physical well-being, but also on your mental health. About five days after I started my own diet, dropping the white carbohydrates and sugar, I began to feel much more energetic and focused than normal, and surprisingly this feeling of being energetic is still with me.

Another thing I noticed was, that my stomach started to feel good. Earlier when I had lunch, my belly was always bloated for the next two-three hours and there was a lot of activity going on; rumblings and quakes. Even though my portion sizes increased on a low-carb diet, my belly was always calm and I never felt bloated even after a huge lunch.

I am not expecting you to change your eating habits. In general, getting people to change their preconceptions or attitudes without resistance is next to impossible. You must have the desire to change within you, and perhaps in that case this article will give you some tools, information and paths to further knowledge about how to make that change a reality.

Sources and references:

Cordain, Lorel. Friel, Joe (2005). The Paleo Diet for Athletes

Eades, Michael R. Eades, Mary Dan (1996). Protein Power

Keith, Lierre (2009). The Vegetarian Myth

Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin - A Time.com article

The Blog of Tim Ferriss

The Blog of Michael R. Eades, M.D.

The Blog of Antti Heikkilä

How reading changed my life

This is a little difficult post to write, as it is rather personal one. I'm trying to describe the events that have taken place in my life during the past 8 months, which has changed me as a person more than probably any other period in my life, yet keep it all constrained around one specific topic; reading.

I guess it's safe to assume that you are an avid reader. If you weren't, I doubt this blog would hold much interest to you. And as I'm writing this I wonder what it is exactly that you like to read? Is this the only blog or are there others you follow? How about popular novels such as those by Paolo Coelho, or do you enjoy the twisted and bizarre tales of Chuck Palahniuk? Perhaps you like adventure, fantasy, sci-fi... Or maybe you are like me and have discovered the joy of reading non-fiction.

When I was a kid I loved books. I could easily read over 300 pages a day in our summer cottage where I had little else to do. The books I read were mainly popular sci-fi and fantasy aimed at the youth. Books by David Eddings, Robert Jordan, Tad Williams, Terry Pratchett and Raymond E. Feist (by the way, I still think that the Empire trilogy by Feist is one of the best series ever revolving around political intrigue - despite the fantasy setting!).

As I grew older I still enjoyed an occasional fiction book, but I didn't really value reading as a pastime activity. I just read a little bit when I was about to go to sleep, or when I was traveling and needed to kill time.

I don't know exactly what happened in the beginning of 2009, but one could say that I was bored with my life. I was not in the physical condition I wanted to be (and had been before). The work I was doing seemed to drag onwards with no surprises or major changes on the way. I guess you could describe the situation as a sort of surface stillness, with everything appearing calm and good from the outside, but on the inside the stillness itself was creating a turmoil. The longer the status quo would continue, the more turmoil it would create.

It was this feeling of inner turmoil - feeling of being able to reach higher, not being satisfied with what I had - that got me to open my mind and actively search for ways to change the status quo. What happened in reality, though, was pure coincidence and luck. A small ripple that caused an avalanche. Then again, I doubt that the ripple would have had such a profound impact if it were some other time in my life.

What happened was, that I was watching Diggnation one day in February, and there was a small off-topic mention about "a guy who built huge amount of muscle in just four weeks". I was intrigued and wanted to know more as I was struggling with my weight at the time. The guy in question was Tim Ferriss. After finding and reading his article about muscular hypertrophy I was even more intrigued. I really liked his writing style and argumentation, so I read more of his stuff and couple weeks later ordered his book The 4-Hour Workweek.

That book was an eye-opener. It got me to question certain things that I had taken for granted, and really made me realize that this is my life. It is up to me what to do with it. And if I want to be true to myself I should do everything I can in order to make it enjoyable and find meaning in it. This was the first non-fiction book I had ever come across that was impossible to put down after starting to read it. I was thoroughly captivated, and hugely enjoyed both the reading experience and the impact it had on my way of thinking.

I realized, that if reading one non-fiction book can be this enjoyable, there must be more of them out there! Books that provide knowledge, change the way you perceive the world and positively affect your happiness. All the while being also joyful and entertaining to read.

I felt like an explorer who had just reached the top of a mountain, looking over a vast landscape with entirely new sights, sounds and sensations. I realized that there are so many things that interest me and of which I want to learn more. But most importantly, I realized that acquiring that knowledge does not need to be an anxious experience.

I have been pondering why I did not discover these great non-fiction books earlier. I suspect, that the main reason for it is the way modern education works. When schools and universities force you to read prescribed material that lacks soul, personality and joy, you get conditioned to the belief, that learning itself is tedious, boring and takes a lot of work. And the only way you can see a non-fiction book is through the eyes of a student; that those books are no different from the ones you had to read at school. That they are anything but entertaining.

As I was reading The 4-Hour Workweek I also discovered few new blogs to follow. The good thing is, that many great books get recommended by bloggers who have read them. I checked those that intrigued me, read the Amazon reviews and started ordering ones I found the most interesting. A list of recommended books in The 4-Hour Workweek also helped. You could, of course, use the local libraries instead of buying the books yourself, but I have always had a soft spot for actually letting the author know how much I appreciate their work, so I don't mind paying a small price to own a copy.

At first my interest was in books related to personal development, business and nutrition. Since then I have also started reading about psychology, philosophy, and most recently photography and graphics design. All this on my own spare time after work and on weekends - simply because those books can be so damn enjoyable! In less than a year I feel like I have acquired more applicable knowledge than I did during my whole time as a university student. On top of which I've gotten myself into better physical shape than ever before as a result of increasing my understanding of nutrition and the inner workings of human body.

Since March I have purchased around 30 non-fiction books (and couple fiction ones) and read all but five of them. I have to admit, that there have been couple stray arrows, but most of the books I've read have been simply amazing. Nowadays, if I consider buying a new book, I'll try to find an excerpt of it (Amazon is great for this!) to verify that I also enjoy the writing style of the author, and that the contents of the book appear to meet my expectations.

There is a huge difference in learning about something you are genuinely interested in, finding the material that intrigues you the most and has gotten the best reviews from fellow readers and academics, as opposed to reading a soulless textbook that no one in their free mind would pick up unless being forced to.

Learning on your own can be truly enjoyable and useful. You just have to give it a try. Find a topic that interests you, search for blogs that match your interest, read some articles and see if there are any recommended books or links to other related blogs. When you find a book that seems interesting, check the Amazon reviews (I usually check both Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk for wider perspective). Sometimes a better book on the topic might be suggested in a review, or you may be able to find a book that is more suited to you by browsing the Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought -list.

Other sides of ownership

I don't know about you, but I believe that people live their lives in pursuit of happiness. Whether or not they consciously realize this doesn't matter. I believe that whatever choice or action a person does, the underlying reason for that particular action relate to the assumption, that by acting the person will feel a little bit happier afterwards. In a bad situation this could also mean, that people will act based on what they believe will cause the least amount of unhappiness or discomfort.

I think that this pursuit of happiness is very much evident in our buying decisions. Why would you buy e.g. a particular car, a pair of jeans, a hi-fi system or a pet unless you expect your quality of life to take a turn to the positive with that purchase?

You may reason, that you need a car to get to work, but you still need to choose which car you want and here the "happiness factor" comes into play. Same goes for buying clothes; I've lost quite a bit of weight during the year, so most of my jeans are too big for me now, but the main reason I got a new pair was that I enjoy looking good. Pure and simple. I can still use the ones that are a bit oversized for me - and obviously I need to wear pants or I'd freeze - but the main factor for choosing this particular pair was the positive feeling I get when I know I look good wearing them. Happiness, again.

But what is happiness, really? I had never paid much attention to this before, but watching the brilliant TED talk Matthieu Ricard on the habits of happiness struck a chord in me. One part of the talk in particular, where he says that people are focusing their attention on the outside, the outer conditions, and concentrate on the things they feel they want or need to obtain in order to be happy. Or when something goes wrong people respond by trying to fix the outside. However, according to him our control of the outside is limited, temporary and often illusory. On the other hand, when focusing on the inside, isn't it the mind that translates the outer condition into happiness or suffering?

The impact of those words has echoed in my head since I first heard them. I felt enlightened. I felt that I found the map that will guide me to enjoy life more, and to be content with what I have. Simply by realizing, that no matter what the outer conditions are the feelings of happiness or anxiety are all in my head, I gained control over those emotions. If something annoying happens, let's say I drop a glass and break it, I get a rush of negative feelings, but now I am able to recognize them for what they are and in a way turn them off. I choose not to have those feelings take over me.

Strangely, this worked even when I was stopped on my motorcycle for speeding a few months ago, and lost my driver's licence as well as one months salary in fines. I chose not to let it get to me and whenever I started thinking "what if I had taken a different road?" or "why did I go so fast, stupid!" I stopped that line of thought immediately. Having those thoughts would not have changed the situation one bit, but they would have made me feel a lot more miserable about it.

So what does this have to do with owning stuff? First of all, when you realize that your mind translates ownership into happiness, you will start to evaluate every single purchase decision from a different point of view. You will also realize, that since happiness is all in your head, buying more stuff is not necessary in order to become happy. Furthermore, whatever you own will lose its appeal over time, sooner or later. This seems to apply also in extreme situations. According to Dan Gilbert, even lottery winners were not able to gain any long-term sustainable happiness although they were able to buy pretty much anything they wanted.

There is also the rarely considered darker side to owning things. This may not apply so much in clothes and other minor possessions, but I certainly felt it when I bought my first motorcycle a bit over a year ago. It was the single biggest purchase I had ever made, and I also needed to take a loan in order to be able to buy it. Now suddenly this vehicle that was meant to give me freedom was starting to take a huge space in my thoughts. I started to worry about crashing it, the increasing gas prices, high insurance costs, regular maintenance costs, where to put it for winter and so on. I did enjoy riding it, hugely, but I never anticipated to have all these other emotions. My dream came with unexpected mental baggage, and when I sold my bike couple months ago I felt relieved to lose that baggage.

In Fight Club, Brad Pitt's character hits straight to the point when he says that "The things you own end up owning you." I know that I will be worrying again in a year about where to store my furniture and other things if I'm going to leave Finland for a student exchange. At that time I will probably curse all the unnecessary stuff that I have accumulated. The less you possess the more you have freedom.

"Desire can't be satisfied by fulfilling. It grows more and more and there is no end of desires. If a person becomes a king of a country he desires other countries. But the one who doesn't want to possess any thing possesses everything. The desires can be given up by understanding desires."
-Sri Baba Hari Dass, 1973 (from the book Less Is More)

The most important thing

Bodies: The Exhibition

There is a single possession that you will have from birth to death. Something that you cannot leave behind and will always follow you. The way you take care of this thing will also have an effect on everything else that takes place during your life. I am, of course, referring to your body.

Considering the importance of this marvelous machinery that has evolved during millions of years, wouldn't you agree that it's worthwhile to make sure it functions at an optimal level throughout your whole life? Your body is much more than just a means of transportation for your mind. It has an enormous impact on your self-image, mood, mental and physical performance, and how others perceive you. So are you taking good care of it?

Ironically, I started thinking about writing this post after having a day that consisted mainly of student initiation rituals involving vodka, a dozen beers and other drinks that I can't even remember. Not that I have anything against giving in to indulgences every now and then, but moderation is needed if you want your body to work for, instead of against you.

I have been physically pretty active most of my life, but when I left to Malaysia for my student exchange back in 2006 all my routines for going to gym, running and practicing martial arts stopped completely. I was in very good shape when I left, but six months in tropical heat surrounded by Southeast Asia's best street kitchens can leave its mark to any man.

When I got back to Finland I had bit of a gut already, but even worse was that I just wasn't able to get back to my pre-exchange workout routine. I tried to go for a run few times, but with my persisting knee problems those remained rather half-hearted attempts. I got stuck in this couch potato condition for almost two years; all the while gaining weight and losing my strength and stamina.

Then two things happened: I was in South Korea for a holiday in August 2008, and when I got back I really saw from my photos - for the first time - that there is no denying I was getting fatter. Before seeing the pictures I was under the impression that I was still of "normal" size, but not anymore. I had gained a gut - and it showed. Clearly.

Soon after the holiday I was on a business trip in Eastern Europe that involved a weekend in Budapest. Coincidentally, there was the Bodies exhibition at the same time. I had heard about it on news couple years earlier, and was very interested in seeing it. It proved to be at the same time illuminating, sickening and delightful. While certain exhibits were rather disturbing and gut-wrenching, the overall feeling I left with was that of amazement. I had never really realized how beautifully crafted the human body is, and how complex its various inner functions are. I started to see myself differently and have a profound respect for the flesh and bones that are part of me.

As a result, I forced myself to get up from the couch and start working out again. Regularly. I wanted to lose the gut that could so clearly be seen on my holiday photos. Before my student exchange I could easily do two hours of martial arts training on 3-4 nights a week, in addition to which I'd play squash and go to the gym or a run once or twice. On average, I was doing physical activities 5 days a week. Now, once again after a two year break I managed to create a workout regime and exercised religiously about five times a week for the whole autumn and early winter.

However, despite my efforts I was unable to gain noticeable changes other than a slight confidence boost and feeling somewhat better and healthier. The gut proved to be of persistent sort and was not going anywhere. I was, however, on the right track. My self-image was starting to change from a person who just sits on his ass and eats packaged foods to someone who leads an active life and strives to be in good physical shape.

Take a moment to reflect. Think about the long way you have come from childhood and how your body has served you the whole time. Instead of stuffing yourself with unhealthy foods, smoking cigarettes or drinking excessively, try to instead listen and respect it when it tells you that sleep is in order, nutrition is needed or when you receive a message of pain saying that whatever you are doing should be stopped before anymore harm comes to it. After all, your body will be with you as long as you are alive. There are no returns. You have gotten an elegant biological system as a birth gift, and it is your responsibility to take as good care of it as you can.

As for me, I am in better physical shape than I have ever been in my life, and I achieved that after actually reducing the amount of exercise. I have learned a lot about the inner functions of human body during the past eight months, and managed to rapidly lose the extra weight once I understood what to do. That, however, is another story which will be told some other time.