For my 40th birthday, my then-9-year-old daughter gave me a little book of daily meditations for men, from the Touchstone series. She didn't realize, not did I until I read the preface, that it was for men in 12-step programs, working through their additions and coming to clarity about themselves and their worth.

For all that, it was humbling to realize that just about every piece of advice, every insight, and every affirmation in the book applied to me pretty much to a tee, despite the fact that I have never participated in a 12-step program and don't really consider myself an addict (not even to blogging, which was a worry of my wife's early on).

My practice is to take a minute a day to read that day's thought and meditation, and consider how I can go through my day in heightened awareness and kindness and joy and courage based on that reminder.

A Challenge from Dietrich

One day the meditation began with a quote by the Luther theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (whose last name is pronounced as if U2's Bono had hooked up with J Lo), as follows:

There are things for which an uncompromising stance is worthwhile.

This is a guy, a German theologician, who decided to publish articles critical of the Nazis when they came to power in 1933, engaged in dangerous efforts to rescue Jews in the 1940s, and was killed by the Nazis in 1945. Possibly someone with an understanding of worthwhile causes and the toll they can take on a person.

I write mostly (in this blog, at least) about family health and fitness; what can parents learn and apply from a man whose life and death were so far removed from our mundane "Eat your vegetables" and "No, you can't have a cookie, how about a piece of fruit?" existence?

I've written many times about not turning the dinner table into a battleground. About being reasonable, understanding, and non-fanatical. About taking the slow road of education and leading by example. Turns out I have a hole in my memory the size of 6 months…

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Weird night in Europe recently, according to the New York Times:

What began as a routine training exercise almost ended in an embarrassing diplomatic incident after a company of Swiss soldiers got lost at night and marched into neighboring Liechtenstein.

According to Swiss daily Blick, the 170 infantry soldiers wandered just over a mile across an unmarked border into the tiny principality early Thursday before realizing their mistake and turning back.

Juxtaposed against that black comedy in the paper's Most Emailed list was the story of another kind of invasion: the nightly encroachment of the "family bed babies" into mommy and daddy's sheets and blankets. For some reason, the article relates, the 1990s were the dawn of the co-sleeping era, when exhausted parents bought a few hours of sleep by sharing their beds, their warmth, and their heartbeats with their babies. The price - no more sex for the parents - was deemed a steep but fair deal.

Now, we're told, as those co-sleeping kids grow into large, gangly collections of limbs, they still insist upon invading their parents' beds nightly. And parental defenses appear inadequate: buying fancy Harry Potter-inspired 4-posters and Cinderella beds may delight the kids while the sun's up, but at night the family bed is the only hot spot in town.

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Actually, I'm as wacky as the next guy, so it's kind of surprising that I didn't really get into a book called The Isaiah Effect, which combines ancient Essene prophecies with modern quantum physics to explain how we can rediscover the lost arts of prophesy and prayer to avoid global destruction and instead usher in an era of peace and love.

Probably I'm down on the book because the author, Gregg Braden, was unshaven in the photo on the back cover, and he looked pretty good. Me, when I don't shave for a day or two, I could audition for "third hoodlum" in a Jackie Chan movie. 

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Take a few seconds and think about the word "disease." What comes to mind?

Most of us think of a "disease" as a fixed state of decreased health. It's something that can be "caused" and sometimes "cured" or "managed," but it's definitely an "it."  A thing. A noun. Something that either exists or doesn't exist.

Big deal, you say? Howie's been reading the dictionary again. Who cares?

In a meeting with T. Colin Campbell (author of The China Study, the only book ever pitched on bended knee by Gary Player live on the Golf Channel), a bunch of us were examining the current model of health care. Dr. Campbell, who has made a career of looking at the obvious and seeing trends that nobody else notices, threw out a comment that our prevailing definition of "disease" is very limiting, and actually leads us to do things that don't really work very well.

What is he talking about?  Keep Reading…

Joel Fuhrman, MD, author of Eat to Live and Disease-Proof Your Child, claims that salt and processed oil are both bad for us. Salt, he claims, citing dozens of "research studies" done by "scientists," raises blood pressure and can predispose us to stomach cancer. Processed oil, he would have us believe, contains 120 nutrient-barren calories per teaspoon, and when cooked at high temperatures, releases the potent carcinogens known as acrylomides.

Well, Dr. Fuhrman, I've got you now - I use about a tablespoon of salt per day, and about a gallon of oil. And I'm just fine. Let me explain…

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Today's New York Times features an article about a branch of homeschooling known as "unschooling." More or less, it's the kind we practice in our home, first with our daughter and now with our son. The thing that struck me about this otherwise fine piece of reporting was a two-word phrase in a caption of a photograph in the multimedia slide show that accompanies the article.  Keep Reading…

Hey, I like video games as much as the next guy… if the next guy is Mahatma Gandhi. Reuters (reported in The Age out of Australia) shared research on the cardiovascular effects of the video game "Dance Dance Revolution" on overweight kids. They found that while playing the game increased heart rate and burned more calories (than, for example, sitting on their butts watching other people dance on MTV), essentially, it made no difference to their weight or fitness.  Keep Reading…

I always have to slow down when a target seems this big and this easy. I mean, cancelling a Planet Fitness patron's membership because he grunted with a quarter ton of steel on his back? I grunt every time my son sneaks up behind me and jumps on my back. And he weighs less than 50 pounds.  Keep Reading…

In today's Disease-Proof Blog, Gerald Pugliese writes in a sad and amazed tone about the American love affair with fried food:

America is obsessed with fried food! And you don’t need to be a health expert to see it. Fried and deep-fried foods are all around us, from French fries to deep-fried Twinkies, Oreos, and Coca-Cola—like drinking it isn’t bad enough. Yes America, we’ve got a frying fetish!

Never is it more evident than at local carnivals and state fairs.

Well, your intrepid FitFam blogger has done the unthinkable: I went undercover to the North Carolina State Fair last month, and managed to capture these exclusive photos of ACTUAL signs advertising ACTUAL fried foods that I could smell, see, and get that tickling feeling in the back of my throat that preceeds an urgent need to vomit.

I'm no Morgan Spurlock, willing to actually put it into my body, but I still think it took a lot of intestinal fortitude (literally!) to take these pictures. Gerald, please sit down before viewing…  Keep Reading…

Peter Bregman and I spent 3 days last week working on the premise of our diet book. As eagle-eyed, elephant-memoried FitFam blog readers will recall, the title changes almost daily (I wish the blog changed daily!).

The concept we (well, all right, mostly Peter) came up with was the idea of "Eating Against the Odds." There's a giant system out there that makes it easy and OK for us to eat junk, and feed junk to our kids.  Keep Reading…