Fitness for Geeks

Preface

How can we define health? Ever tried to take a stab at it? I attempt to define “fitness” and “geek” here because they appear in the title. But it seems health is a mélange of a lot of things—genes, lifestyle, a feeling of being safe and in charge—not all of which we can put a finger on.

We tend to grope around in defining good nutrition and health. We can be too reductionist in our view of who’s healthy or whether we are healthy, claiming that “nutrition is 90 percent of health,” or that we have achieved some perfect biomarker like total cholesterol after six tests at the doctor’s office, so therefore we must be healthy. Or maybe we find out our telomeres are resilient and hanging in there, or we take a long survey on the Web, and the results pat us on the back and suggest we’ll live to be one hundred. Many of these things seem like feel-good, almost delusional exercises. So much about health is mysterious, yet to be discovered, and may never be discovered. I like that aspect of it, because it leads to more experimentation. Maybe your own ideas about how to stay healthy haven’t been refuted yet.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t aim for health, particularly if your current strategy has you waking up in the morning most days feeling pretty good. That’s where my “fitness” and “geek” definitions come in.

This is a book about fitness and nutrition for the independent of spirit and irrepressibly curious. The reason I have cleaved “nutrition” off from the general rubric of fitness ...