'Drop Dead Healthy': 8 of A.J. Jacob's unusual get-fit regimens

From a working at a treadmill desk to practicing extreme chewing, here are 8 strategies A.J. Jacobs tried as part of his quest for perfect fitness.

7. Avoiding sugar

By Asabengurtza

Jacobs experimented with cutting sugar out of his diet and did fairly well except for one item he found almost impossible to dispose of entirely: dried mangoes. "My willpower is failing me here," he wrote. Finally, he hit on an odd strategy using a form of negative motivation. He made a request of his wife: "'If I have another dried mango this month, I want you to donate a thousand dollars of my money to the American Nazi Party,'" Jacobs told her. He said it worked. "I haven't eaten a dried mango in two weeks," he wrote.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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