So this weekend I hit a goal that I hadn’t been entirely sure I was ever going to reach: for the first time since I was a teenager, I officially weighed in under 200 pounds. I’ve never been happier with the way my body looks, although I’ve still got a small gut, soft, saggy tits […]

Communal bathing isn’t part of American culture, but after a trip this weekend to a Russian bath house in Manhattan, I’m swayed that it should be.
I’ve been fighting off the tail end of a cold for a few days, so thought the steam and sauna might knock out the rest of the gunk. Or at […]

A study conducted by Göttingen University in Germany shows that the hippocampus shrinks less for drinkers of beer than wine or the hard stuff.
The ground-breaking study shows that the hippocampus, the part of the brain involved in memory, spatial tasks and many other functions, was more than 10 per cent smaller in those whose […]

Mein Gott! It seems smoking is now forbidden in Germany. Initially I thought the Bavarians would reject such laws in favor of tradition, but no! Even the festival tents will be Rauchenfrei.
Smoking in fest tents will still be allowed in Rheinland-Pfalz, whereas in Bavaria it won’t, although most fest tents can be found at the […]

Two interesting pieces came on my radar this weekend. I’m not about to give up meat entirely, but it has become less and less of my diet of late, and after my birthday early next month, I’m probably going to end up cutting it out almost entirely for a couple of months while I work […]

I like what Serious Eats‘ Ed Levine has to say about losing weight this year. Rigorous, boring systems never work; changing the way you appreciate food certainly does. Most of what he outlines are the very same things that helped me lose and keep off 45 pounds last year. (And will hopefully help me shed […]

I’m back on the fat horse. Two of my good friends are getting married in later October and since they are die-hard proponents of the “Situation: Awesome” school of event planning, it’s going to be the sort of thing where I can dress up in an outfit all you pricks will make fun of me […]

According some work done by researchers, the beer belly—or at least the idea that beer and wine specifically show up as pounds over the gut—may be a myth:
There were few heavy drinkers. Just 3% of men drank more than 14 litres of beer in a week and just five women regularly consumed more than 7 […]

For the last month I have been hitting the elliptical with surprisingly regularity—at least every other day, for upwards of thirty minutes at a stretch. It was part of a planned regimen to prepare myself to visit the local CrossFit gym, although I have yet to muster the gumption to visit. In fact, I probably […]

“Our research, which used the minimum leg-muscle mass T-rex required for movement, suggests that while not incredibly fast, this carnivore was certainly capable of running and would have little difficulty in chasing down footballer David Beckham, for instance,” said Phil Manning, a paleontologist at the University of Manchester, who worked on the study.
Mr. Manning (who […]

Reader “Goophball” sent me this clip of a ridiculously fast free climb up the side of a cliff by Dan Osman. If that’s the sort of thing that would make you say to yourself, “I bet that idiot killed himself,” you’d be partially right. Osman did die in a climbing-related accident when his “rope failed […]

Wondering if Jet Ski and other personal water craft had done anything to improve their emissions, I stumbled on this comically horrible gem.
From thePersonal Water Craft entry on Wikipedia:
A rider who falls (or is ejected) off the back can land directly in the path of the PWC’s high-pressure jet of water. Unless a rider is […]