Losing Fat With Simple Food-- Two Reader Anecdotes

Each week, I'm receiving more e-mails and comments from people who are successfully losing fat by eating simple (low reward) food, similar to what I described here.  In some cases, people are breaking through fat loss plateaus that they had reached on conventional low-carbohydrate, low-fat or paleo diets.  This concept can be applied to any type of diet, and I believe it is an important characteristic of ancestral food patterns.

At the Ancestral Health Symposium, I met two Whole Health Source readers, Aravind Balasubramanian and Kamal Patel, who were interested in trying a simple diet to lose fat and improve their health.  In addition, they wanted to break free of certain other high-reward activities in their lives that they felt were not constructive.  They recently embarked on an 8-week low-reward diet and lifestyle to test the effectiveness of the concepts.  Both of them had previously achieved a stable (in Aravind's case, reduced) weight on a paleo-ish diet prior to this experiment, but they still carried more fat than they wanted to.  They offered to write about their experience for WHS, and I thought other readers might find it informative.  Their story is below, followed by a few of my comments.

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my kiddos got up at 5:15 today....i might need an inspirational quote to get me through this day......this one seems pretty good :)

*images courtesy of hearts at a carnival,  house of turquoise , middle child complex, one kings lane

Advice for new professors

A summary of advice I have for new professors.*

1) Delegate

Graduate students were invented for a reason. Delegate everything. Data analysis. Literature reviews. Writing. Teaching prep. If you don't have any graduate students, find some undergrads. A task you might find mundane can actually be "research experience". 

One of my colleagues laments that their students often mess things up, causing even more work than just doing it themselves. For some things this may be true, but thus far I've been pleasantly surprised with what happens when I challenge my students. Even if they don't do a perfect job they are still doing useful work for both of us.

For CS-type folks -- get someone else to manage your machines. I know it's tempting to spend hours and hours tweaking your linux box to play fur elise backwards every other Tuesday at 2:22pm and building That Perfect Windows Manager config file and whatever other fun hacky things you do, but try to resist the urge. Shell scripts won't get you tenure (damnit). 

2) Ask

I read Boice's advice for new faculty, and he implied "quick starters" ask everyone for help on everything - research, teaching, grant writing, etc. This is helpful to remember. Spending three hours trying to find an arcane policy statement on NSF's website isn't worth the time when a quick email to your university's research support office will suffice. 

3) Network

Don't forget to water your social networks, both in your department, at your university, in your town, and in your professional community. This is something you shouldn't delegate or put off. 

Of course you don't want to spend all of your time networking; I think Boice suggests about 2-5 hours a week. YMMV.

4) Dry Clean

Best. Thing. Ever. Absolutely worth every penny. To just wake up in the morning, go to your closet, have cleaned and pressed professional clothes ready to go is just about the best thing since fur elise.

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(*)  To be honest I just had one piece of advice ("Dry cleaning FTW!"), but I thought I'd throw the other ones in too while I was here.