by A. J. Jacobs
I’m wearing my Vibrams for today’s run. I wish I could have gone full McDougall, but I’m germaphobic, and fear contact between my naked soles and the sidewalk, so Vibrams it is.
McDougall gathers us round to give us a primer on technique. We’re told to land lightly on the front of the foot and let the heels just kiss the ground.
Take small steps. Cushy sneakers encourage long strides because the heels don’t hurt as they pound the ground. But that’s not what humans are meant to do. And also, try to pull your legs up instead of stomping them down.
“Think of it like you have pancakes on your upper thighs, and you’re trying to raise your knees to flip them,” McDougall says.
And perhaps, most important, it’s about being joyful when you run.
And with that, off we go. We trot west on 125th Street, past shops and street vendors selling Bob Marley posters. We look a little odd, flipping our imaginary pancakes, and we do not go unnoticed by the pedestrians.
“Put on some damn shoes!”
“Stop running like a bunch of girls!” (The toe running does have a certain prancing tenor to it.)
“White people are taking over Harlem!”
We enter the park and head up a gentle hill, making our way toward the reservoir. I catch up with McDougall, and we pat along.
“Look at this,” he says, stopping and showing me the bottom of his foot. It’s midnight black.
“Do you worry about stepping on things?” I huff.
“It doesn’t bother me. I live in rural Pennsylvania, so I step in all sorts of things. Horseshit, you name it. You learn to avoid the sharp objects,” he says.
I ask him to critique my running.
“You’ve got a heel-heavy stride, man!”
I land too hard on the back of my foot. I try leaning forward more. “That’s better,” McDougall says.
I tell him that I sometimes run on the treadmill at the gym, which I suspect he thinks is a bad idea. I’m right.
“You tend to want to race the treadmill, so you take big strides,” he says. “If you have to do it, my advice would be to go right up to the front of the treadmill, so your hips are right against the bars. Not to get too carnal about it, but get up there and go at it.” He mimes a dry hump. It may seem lascivious, McDougall says, but at least you’ll be taking smaller steps.
McDougall trots off to help another runner. A few minutes later, we’re running down a Central Park path, all sixty of us, when we see a stocky jogger heading right toward us.
He grimaces as he tries to navigate his way through this river of half-barefoot people.
“Oh, come on!” he shouts as he brushes by us.
“Wow, he seemed angry,” I say.
“I think it’s because he was wearing shoes,” says a barefoot woman.
We laugh.
“They were probably too tight and giving him bad energy.”
“He’s like the Grinch. His shoes are two sizes too small,” calls out another runner.
I love being an insider, a member of the shoeless Mafia. Those poor squares trapped in their sneaker jails. But as for the pure joy of running that McDougall speaks about? I’m not feeling it.
The Appropriately Named Foot Doctor
A couple of weeks later, I ended up in the office of Dr. Krista Archer. Dr. Archer is a respected foot surgeon in New York with shoulder-length blond hair. She often appears on morning TV to talk about, say, how to minimize damage from stiletto heels.
I’d come to see her for some advice on how to have the healthiest feet, and also to get her take on the great barefoot debate.
Should I exercise without shoes?
“I’m not an advocate,” she says.
She explains: If you have no foot problems, if your feet are models of biomechanical perfection, going shoeless might be fine. But if you have any quirks, if, for instance, your foot rolls inward or outward too much, then put on the sneakers.
“Running puts a huge load on the feet—three times the body weight on the front foot.”
But isn’t the foot designed to run barefoot? “That doesn’t mean it’s the best way to do it,” Dr. Archer says. “We used to use dial-up modems. Should we stick with them? If you’re nearsighted, should you avoid glasses because they’re not ‘natural’?”
In fact, she suggests that I buy a foam insert for my sneakers. As McDougall said, I do land too hard on my heels.
I’ll return to Dr. Archer in a moment, but let me say this. After talking to other doctors and reading everything I could on the topic, I can confidently say: The jury’s still out on the barefoot movement. It shouldn’t be dismissed as a wackadoodle fad. It does make some logical sense. But on the other hand, it probably shouldn’t be adopted by everyone. Medicine is increasingly personal, and the feet are no exception. It’s something to try. Nowadays, I take about a quarter of my runs sans shoes.
Back in Dr. Archer’s office, I slip off my shoes and socks for my exam.
She looks at my heels, which are covered in thick, callused skin. They have cracks big enough to fit dimes, maybe nickels.
Her diagnosis: “Ouchy.”
I’m going to need to add another task to my enormous list of daily commandments: exfoliating my heels in the shower. I tell her she should have seen my feet a week ago. Julie just took me to my first pedicure as part of Project Health, and the Korean woman spent five minutes polishing my heel.
“Did you like the pedicure?” she asked.
“Not really,” I say. The whole woman-kneeling-at-your-feet dynamic made me feel too much like a viceroy of a British colony.
“You have to be careful with pedicures,” she says.
Dr. Archer lists all the horrible problems that pedicures can unleash. When you get a pedicure, she tells me, you are submerging your feet in a swamp of germs. The jets in the footbath are clogged with bits of skin from previous clients.
“People get fungus all the time from pedicures,” she says.
If I ever go again, she says, I should bring my own nail file, clippers, and buffers. In fact, Archer is releasing an antifungal treatment—it’s made from tea tree oil—that I could apply to my toes pre- and post-pedicure.
“And you should never let them cut the cuticles,” she says. “The cuticles are your body’s defense against bacteria.” I assure her, my cuticles will remain intact.
Checkup: Month 14
Weight: 157
New vocabulary words learned to keep brain in shape: 301 (Today’s: “cyanosis,” the condition of having blue skin.)
Quinoa consumed since start of project: 44 pounds
Pounds lifted on squat machine (15 reps): 360
I’m typing this update in a tiny rented basement office. To get work done, I needed a refuge from my lovable but boundary-defying children.
It’s a depressing and dank little dungeon that’s only missing the foot chains. The upside? It’s freezing. At times, I have to put on my Patagonia overcoat and type with a pair of fingerless gloves.
This is good, because being cold burns more calories. A 2009 article in the journal Obesity Reviews by a University College London professor reports that the obesity epidemic can be blamed partly on our tendency to crank up the thermostat. American bedroom temperature has crept up from 66.7 degrees in 1987 to 68 in 2005. When it’s chilly, we have to burn more fuel just to maintain our body temperature. Cold also activates something called brown fat, which is easier to burn than white fat.
Tim Ferriss’s book The 4-Hour Body recommends cold therapy for weight loss. He says an ice pack on the back of the neck will help. Or if you’re a tough guy, a ten-minute ice bath. I hate that my dungeon has no treadmill desk, but at least I am shivering.
Incidentally, my arctic conditions haven’t given me a cold. Which makes sense, since even Ben Franklin pointed out more than two centuries ago that cold doesn’t cause colds.
But everyone else in my family does have a cold. Lucas, Zane, Jasper, Julie—they’re all sneezing and wheezi
ng. I’m the only one in no need of a neti pot.
It’s no fun to be surrounded by cranky coughers, and I feel terrible, especially for Lucas, who is leaking like the maddening air conditioner on the floor above us. But there’s a small part of me that is smugly satisfied.
All this sweating, eating right, and stressing less—maybe it’s working. Maybe this is what it feels like to be healthy. Maybe my overly welcoming immune system has finally decided to get rude. It’s a historic time.
Chapter 15
The Lungs
The Quest to Breathe Better
ON A SATURDAY, we take our kids to the Bodies exhibit at the South Street Seaport. This popular museum show displays actual cadavers in various positions. Some are cut into slices like a deli pastrami. Some are stripped of skin and frozen in heroic stances, such as tossing a football or conducting a symphony.
The exhibit is a little more graphic than I anticipated. Maybe a little much for my four-year-old twins. Maybe a little much for me. In the bone section, one glass case holds a tiny pelvic bone from what looks to be a six-month-old child.
The woman next to me peers into the glass case, spots the remains, and says, with all earnestness, “Ohhhh. That’s so cute.” To me, not cute. Harrowing. It reminds me of Casper the Friendly Ghost, the strangest comic book in history. The creators just gloss right over the horrid backstory. Are we just supposed to forget that a child had to die to produce this chipper poltergeist?
Luckily, my sons aren’t too fazed. They are most interested by a huge plastic container filled waist-high with packs of discarded cigarettes. They love the colors and designs on the boxes.
A sign next to the container warns: EVERY TIME YOU SMOKE A PACK OF CIGARETTES, YOU LOSE THREE HOURS AND FORTY MINUTES OFF YOUR LIFE. Passersby are encouraged to drop their packs in the slot and regain those hours.
“Why do people smoke?” Jasper asks as we walk to the next room.
“Well, you know how Zane liked his pacifier?” Julie says. “It’s the same thing with grown-ups and cigarettes. It feels good. It gives you something to do with the mouth. Also, they’re supposed to be relaxing.”
What is she saying? Maybe she should add that cigarettes have a cool, refreshing flavor, like you’re breathing Rocky Mountain air.
I shoot her a look. “You don’t have to sell it quite that hard.”
“Yeah, that didn’t come out right,” she says.
For someone who hates smoking as much as Julie does, she sure knows how to talk it up. If we find Parliaments in our boys’ Incredible Hulk backpacks, I’ll know whom to blame.
I’ve been focusing on my lungs this month. Without those eleven-pound organs—and their 1,500 miles of airways and 500 million tiny air sacs—I wouldn’t be around to worry about any other body parts.
I’ve been reading a lot about smoking. I almost wish I’d been a smoker. That way, I could have made a huge improvement by quitting during Project Health. But sadly, I smoked my only cigarette at age fifteen. I spent the next ten minutes getting sick while clutching a sidewalk trash can with both hands.
So cigarettes made me ill in the short run. Which saved me from getting ill in the long run. Cigarettes are still the leading preventable cause of death in America, killing about 440,000 people a year. The unfortunate part is, if they weren’t so horribly bad for you, cigarettes could be very handy in stopping the obesity epidemic. Nicotine is one of the only proven appetite suppressants. Studies show that smokers are generally thinner than us nonpuffers. The cigarette industry has tried to exploit the weight-loss angle over the years. Consider the cleverly named Virginia Slims brand that was marketed to women. Or else Lucky Strikes’ famous 1920s campaign of “reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.” (Which, incidentally, spawned one of the most ridiculous feuds in health history: The National Confectioners Association threatened to sue Lucky. The candy lobby published antismoking pamphlets that, as Allan Brandt writes in The Cigarette Century, stressed the importance of candy as food.)
But alas, cigarettes’ costs far outweigh any resulting trimness, just as asphyxiation outweighs the benefits of stretching out the spine when you hang yourself from a shower curtain rod.
The Science of Inhaling and Exhaling
I’ve been breathing wrong my whole life. By my calculations, I’ve taken 220,752,000 incorrect breaths, plus or minus.
According to people who think about the lungs a lot, my problem is twofold: I breathe shallowly and through my mouth.
Let me take those problems one at a time.
I’ve always been a mouth breather. When I listen back to interviews I’ve tape-recorded, it sounds like Darth Vader is doing push-ups in the background. I’d hoped this year to learn that mouth breathing is good for you, so I could proclaim its benefits and start a Mouth Breathing Pride movement.
Unfortunately, it’s not. The nose conditions the air—it warms it up, humidifies it, and filters out harmful bacteria. It provides multiple lines of defense, including regular hair, microscopic hair (cilia), bones called turbinates, and mucus. Plus, some doctors argue that nose breathing produces nitrous oxide, which dilates the blood vessels and increases oxygen absorption.
And then there’s deep breathing. According to The Harvard Medical School Guide to Stress Management, deep breathing slows your heart rate and lowers your blood pressure. (The same guide also has one of the greatest passages I’ve read all year: “A ‘washboard’ stomach, considered so attractive in our culture, encourages men and women to constrict their stomach muscles. This adds to tension and anxiety, and gradually makes ‘chest breathing’ feel normal.” Six-pack abs are bad for you! Harvard says so! A huge relief for me.)
I decided I needed some lessons in deep breathing. First, I went to see the owner of perhaps the most famous pair of lungs in America—David Blaine. Blaine has the world record for holding his breath. He did it for seventeen minutes and four seconds. He used a method called “lung-packing,” where you breathe in as much air as you can, then squeeze in even more air with four short inhalations. (I know this is an overused phrase, but if there’s one time it fits, this is it: PLEASE do not do this at home.)
I’d met Blaine when I interviewed him for Esquire. I went into the article skeptically but found him charming and thoughtful. Plus, he’s obsessed with health. (His morning juice recipe, which I’ve tested several times: “Two cloves of garlic, bok choy, kale, collard greens, spinach, half a beet, half an apple, two lemons, and cayenne pepper.”)
I arrived at Blaine’s office, with its huge posters of Houdini and a motorcycle in the entryway. When I got there, Blaine was on the phone having a normal, everyday conversation about an upcoming appearance. “Yeah, this is the last time I’m going to eat glass,” he says. “I promised my fiancée. It does crazy damage. It rips up my stomach, takes all the enamel off my teeth.” Agreed. Blaine hangs up.
He offers me a fist-size stalk of raw ginger, supposedly good for preventing colon cancer and inflammation. It would be rude to say no.
“Just chew it, get the juice, then spit it out,” he says. He tears into a hunk of his own with his enamel-free teeth.
I ask him about what to do to get the healthiest lungs.
“If you want the cleanest air, you should move to Tasmania or Antarctica. But if that’s not possible, you should get an IQAir Purifier. It’s the brand that the athletes used in the Beijing Olympics.”
And what about deep breathing? I don’t need to hold my breath for a quarter of an hour. But I would like to breathe deeper.
Blaine inhales. “Feel the air fill your lungs,” he says. I do. “Now feel the air fill your stomach, your shoulders, everywhere.” I try to imagine my whole torso filling with air. I hold it in, and then exhale. Blaine doesn’t.
“Now let’s do some stretches,” he says.
“How do you like your ginger?” he asks as we slowly wave our arms overhead. I tell him it’s got more of a kick than I imagined. He still hasn’t exhaled.
Before I leave, we
chat some more about the Esquire article. He does, eventually, exhale. I liked Blaine’s advice about trying to get air into every crevice of your upper body. But I wanted a second opinion.
I got it from a vocal coach named Justin Stoney. Stoney had me lie on the floor, put my hand on my stomach, and feel it rise when I inhaled. “Don’t even try to inhale,” he said. “Just push out your stomach, and you’ll create a vacuum, and the air will come in. When you exhale, flatten your stomach out.”
This stomach-breathing turned out to be a life changer. A small life changer, but still. When I run, I stomach-breathe, and I don’t do nearly as much huffing and puffing as I used to. It saves me from that unpleasant burning-chest feeling. I’m doing it right now, at my treadmill desk. I’m pushing out my stomach on the inhale so that it resembles an Andrew Weil–like potbelly, then sucking back in on the exhale.
Moments of Zen
I can’t leave the topic of deep breathing without mentioning meditation. Meditation, like yoga and libertarianism, has gone mainstream. Marines meditate cross-legged, their rifles on their laps, as part of their training. My six-year-old son does breathing exercises at school (though their mantra is the not-so-Hindi “sniff the flower, blow out the candle”). The medical benefits are rock-solid: lower rates of depression and heart disease, improved attention.
I first learned meditation from a Zen center in the Village when I wrote an article on unitasking—the art of doing only one thing at a time. For the past few months, I’ve been meditating a couple of times a week in the living room, after Julie’s gone to sleep, sitting on the floor and staring at the wall for ten minutes.
But lately, I’ve tried to meditate every day. Because of time constraints, I end up doing what I call contextual meditation. I meditate anywhere when I have five minutes—on the bus, on the subway, waiting for a walk sign.
I’m not alone. I found a wellness website with instructions on how to meditate in a noisy environment. I tried it when I was undergoing an MRI the other day (I was getting scanned for a brief episode of blurry vision, which turned out to be nothing.) Now, if you’ve never had an MRI, you should know that they are loud, almost comically so. The technician gives you earplugs, but that doesn’t come close to blocking the sound. The MRI has a repertoire of noises that resemble, in no particular order: a game-show buzzer for a wrong answer, urgent knocking, a modem from 1992, a grizzly-bear growl, and a man with a raspy voice shouting what sounds like “mother cooler!”
