Drop Dead Healthy

The Adrenal Gland

The Quest to Lower My Stress Level

IT OCCURS TO ME THAT writing a book about health is not healthy. In fact, writing any book is bad for you.

There’s the sedentary lifestyle (which I’ve curbed somewhat with my treadmill desk). There’s the isolation—being alone breeds depression, which helps explain the absurd number of authors who’ve come to unhappy endings (Hemingway, Woolf, Plath—I could fill up the rest of the page).

And then there’s the pressure. I’m way behind schedule. My publisher keeps reminding me of my deadline, and I keep replying that deadlines are incompatible with health. As are book releases. If and when my book comes out, what if I get the flu or an eye infection or something? I worry about that a lot. “You see the world’s healthiest man?” they’ll say. “He’s the one in the corner with a hacking cough.”

To combat this conundrum, I’m wrestling with stress this month.

Before this year, I was a bit of a skeptic. I was still too much of a Cartesian dualist to believe that stress was all that bad for your body. No more. Stress is not like vibes or auras. There’s an Everest of data showing that stress wreaks all sorts of physiological havoc.

The term “stress,” as psychologist Dr. Esther Sternberg writes in her book Healing Spaces, was coined by a Hungarian endocrinologist named Hans Selye. So obsessed was he with the concept, he had the chemical structure of the stress hormone cortisol carved into the stone above his front door.

Like so much else in the body, stress started out as a helpful ally back in Paleo times. Stress increases the heart rate, which is useful in the short term for running and fighting. It even helps ward off some disease in the short term. A study in the Journal of Clinical Immunology measured immune cell levels in skydivers just as they were about to jump. They had 34 percent higher disease-fighting natural killer cells.

But over the long haul, the high heart rate and constricted blood vessels suppress the immune system. The more worry, the more sickness. In one of many such studies, a researcher found that mouth wounds took 40 percent longer to heal when students were in the middle of exam week.

There’s a big problem with acknowledging that the mind plays a part in physical disease. We’re tempted to blame the patient. Stop being so grumpy and you’ll get better. You can will (or pray or think) yourself out of sickness! Buck up!

This danger fed my skepticism about the bodily effects of stress and moods. It smacks of The Secret, that bestselling but bunkum-filled book that says you can wish those cancer cells right out of your body. The last thing a melanoma patient needs to hear is that they should “turn that frown upside down” if they want to get better.

Robert Sapolsky—author of the great book on stress Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers—calls it a “lapsarian” view, “characterizing illness as the punishment meted out by God for sin.”

And indeed, so far, science shows no link between cancer and stress. That’s important to state, because much of America believes otherwise. Sapolsky cites a 2001 study where the majority of patients believed their breast cancer was caused not by genetics, diet, or environment, but by stress.

But when it comes to other health problems, stress gets trickier. Studies show a huge link between stress and heart disease. And studies also show that we can, to some extent, control our stress level.

At least for me, this leads to a horrible positive feedback loop of worry. If I worry too much, I’ll increase my likelihood of heart disease. So I worry about worrying too much. And that increases my worry. Which makes me worry I’m even more at risk for heart disease. I need help.

Ho, Ho, Ho, Ha, Ha, Ha

It’s Monday night, and I’ve chosen to go to a laughter club. I read about laughter clubs—also called laughter yoga—in Time magazine, and they seem like a relatively painless, if dorky, way to cut down on stress.

The club I chose is led by a chiropractor named Alex Eingorn in his midtown office. Eingorn writes on the website: “It’s free, but I’ll accept $2 million donations with no questions asked.”

Eingorn, it turns out, looks a bit like Mikhail Baryshnikov. He speaks with a slight Russian accent and is happy and welcoming, as you’d hope a laughter club leader would be. He wears casual blue Nike shorts and a sweatshirt.

There are fifteen of us tonight, ranging in age from early twenties to eighties, and we stand in a circle.

“Are you ready?” asks Alex. “Okay, drop and give me twenty.”

We all chuckle.

“Any newcomers?” Alex asks.

I raise my hand.

“How’d you hear about us?”

“The Internet,” I say.

A wave of laughs and titters. I like this room. This isn’t what you’d call a tough room. This room could, in fact, be the easiest in New York City. I’m not sure why “Internet” got such a big reaction. Its association with porn? With geeks? Who knows. I’m just happy “the Internet” was considered an Algonquin-worthy quip.

Eingorn asks us to go around the room and say our names and occupations. And, he adds, somewhat unnecessarily, we should respond to each other with laughter. That will break the tension.

First guy: “I’m Tom. I’m an accountant.”

There’s some laughter.

Second guy: “I’m Steve. I’m a consultant.”

More laughs.

Third guy: “I’m also Steve.”

Big laughs. A callback.

There was a psychoanalyst (good reaction), plumber (huge one), and then me.

“I’m A.J. and I’m a writer,” I said.

Everyone busts out at that one, rivaling the response for the plumber. This time I have mixed feelings. What’s so funny about a writer? Is it really as humorous as the plumber, an occupation known for clogged toilets and low-riding pants? Intellectually, I know the group is just following orders, but a deeply buried part of me feels as though they are mocking me. A writer? In this day and age? Time to dust off the résumé, pal.

For the newbies, Eingorn gives a quick intro to laughter clubs. The movement was started by an Indian physician named Madan Kataria in the mid-1990s. It soon spread all over the world, with a reported six thousand clubs in sixty countries. (A poster in the corner shows a record-breaking ten thousand people in Copenhagen chuckling in a plaza on World Laughter Day, the first Sunday in May.)

We don’t tell jokes, says Eingorn, because humor is subjective. We just laugh.

“We like to say, ‘Fake it till you make it.’ Force yourself to laugh in the beginning, and you’ll eventually start laughing in earnest.”

The health benefits are huge, he says. Laughter lowers the level of the stress hormone cortisol. It boosts immunity and reduces pain. A University of Maryland study found that big laughers had a 40 percent lower rate of heart disease than nonlaughers. (Though, to be fair, that could be because heart disease doesn’t put one in the jolliest mood.) And it’s even good exercise. A Vanderbilt researcher found that fifteen minutes of laughing burns forty calories.

I didn’t want to bring it up, but Eingorn was slightly overstating the case. Some studies have shown that laughter does indeed lower stress levels. But what about fake laughter? No one has any rigorous studies on that.

Enough warm-up. Time for the laughter yoga. There isn’t so much yoga, actually. Just a handful of stretches.

Instead, the experience is like a cocktail party, where you mill around the room, exchanging witty repartee with the other guests. The only difference is that there are no cocktails and no witty repartee. Just the laughter.

And to keep it interesting, you laugh in different ways. We go through about ten different laughs over the course of the hour. In no particular order, there was:

• the “oops, I dropped a vase” laughter. Here, we mime fumbling a vase, then shrug our shoulders and laugh.

• the “I’m late” laugh. We point to our invisible watches and shrug our shoulders and give a carefree laugh.

• the explosive laughter.

• the snort-filled laughter.

• the “no-no-no” laugh. In this one, we wag a finger and remonstrate with our fellow laugher for an imaginary transgression.

• the laugh of retribution. “Sometimes in life you feel like a heroic statue. And sometimes you feel like a pigeon who is looking for statues to take a dump on. So we’re going to be the pigeon.” Here, we flap our arms, say “bok, bok, bok,” momentarily squat down, then laugh.

I am faking it, not making it. I force myself to emit laughing sounds so I won’t look like a grump. But I am mostly experiencing a blend of emotions: fascination that this throaty exhalation of air has evolved into a signal for joy, mixed with embarrassment that I’m making such a spectacle of myself, even if others are making the same spectacle. And occasionally I feel jealous at other people’s laughing skills. This one guy—the psychoanalyst with the ironed oxford shirt—has a wonderful basso profundo laugh. One of the Steves—the one in chinos—is a full-body shaker.

“Good laughing,” everyone tells them.

Most people’s laughs fade slowly at the end of each two-minute exercise, but the redhead with tights can turn it off suddenly, like someone had tripped over her power cord. Her discipline makes me nervous.

“Ho, ho, ho, ha, ha, ha!” we chant as we do at the end of every round.

During the next exercise, we laugh while miming pouring water into an empty cup. I am laughing face-to-face with a sixtyish woman in purple sweatpants, when she leans in and says, “You look more like you’re yawning than laughing.” At least I think that’s what she said. There’s a lot of background noise. But I think she is criticizing my laugh, which does not seem in keeping with the laughter club ethos.

I purse my lips, annoyed. I don’t like her technique either, frankly. Way too shticky for me. Lots of eyebrow work and jazz hands.

“Ho, ho, ho, ha, ha, ha.”

“Woody Allen said that ‘I’m thankful for laughter, except when milk comes out of my nose,’” says Eingorn.

No one laughs, not even in this room. I feel bad for Eingorn, so I muster a cackle.

Eingorn reiterates the importance of positive emotions: “As Norman Cousins said, we all know that negative feelings make you sick. If you’re depressed, you can have a heart attack. Or you can die of a broken heart.” Alex mimes a heart coming out of his chest and splattering on the floor. We laugh.

And now the sumo laugh. We all put our hands on our thighs and stomp around the room, giggling. At this point, I have a thought. What if an actual four-hundred-pound sumo wrestler came into the room, diapered and oiled, and started tossing all of us against the walls? It’s not a particularly funny thought in retrospect. It’s a little violent, in fact. But at the time, it must have broken the tension for me. Because I chuckle for real.

A young adult novelist catches me chuckling, and she starts laughing. And I start laughing harder. And we look at each other. And then I am really laughing. A bladder-straining bout of laughter, the kind I’d get in high school assembly during, say, the singing of a Thanksgiving song, and which I tried to contain by thinking of my grandparents’ funerals and my own eventual decomposing corpse. But here I don’t need to contain it.

Ho, ho, ho, ha, ha, ha!

Eingorn wraps the class up: “The goal of the laughter movement is world peace. I know it’s corny. But we believe that if you’re laughing you can’t be angry. And if everyone laughed, they’d stop being so angry. So let’s take a moment of silence to say a prayer or a meditation and just think about world peace.” I close my eyes. Someone titters, which I figure is okay.

I walk home, flushed, a bit elated, like I just had two Amstel Lights, but also relieved not to have to laugh on command.

Julie arrives home the same time as me. She’d taken a friend to a play called The Scottsboro Boys for the friend’s fortieth birthday.

“How was the show?” I ask.

“I really liked it,” she says.

“Yeah, I heard it got good notices,” I say.

Good notices? Who talks like that anymore? I sound like I’m in a Damon Runyon story. I wonder to myself where that phrase came from.

Julie, God bless her, isn’t going to let this slide.

“Yes, it got good notices,” she says, laughing. “The press agents were very happy.”

Now I’m laughing, too. It’s not an explosive laugh or a sumo laugh, but it’s a good laugh. She doesn’t let it drop, mentioning the Stork Club, Walter Winchell, and J. J. Hunsecker. Julie beats the joke right into the ground. For that, I love her. No one can make me laugh like Julie can, not even Eingorn.

Magical Thinking

There’s a great quote I once read, but I can’t figure out who said it, despite intensive Googling. It’s from a celebrity who was asked as he got off a plane, “How was your flight?” To which he replied: “Terrible. I’m exhausted from keeping the damn plane in the air with my worrying.”

That’s how I feel a lot of the time. I’m a master of magical thinking.

My general feeling is: If I fret long and hard enough about X, then X will not occur. If I don’t fret, if I go about happily reading my American Way and chuckling at the Nicolas Cage movie, I’ll be punished for my insouciance. As will everyone on the flight. In this horrible perversion of the Puritan work ethic, it’s my duty to fret.

To properly engage in magical thinking, I find you have to think of every possible ghastly scenario. That’s the only way you outsmart fate.

This ritual can be tremendously time-consuming. The other night, Julie went to a movie with her mom. Three hours later, she still wasn’t home. Three hours and twenty minutes—nothing. I called her cell phone. No answer. I checked the movie length. Just an hour and twenty minutes.

I had my work cut out for me.

Maybe she was killed.

Maybe she had an ischemic stroke.

Maybe there was a bioterror attack at the theater.

You have to be thorough and cover even the most unlikely of scenarios.

Maybe she met another guy. Probably an old boyfriend—she went on a lot of blind dates back in the day.

Choked on the Twizzlers.

Fell on the third rail on the C-line.

I searched the Internet for New York crime stories. Nothing about Julie or a nerve gas explosion at the Loews cineplex.

Finally, three hours and forty minutes later, I hear the latch on the door click. I’m flooded with relief. But also a sense of victory that I got her home safely. Thank God I outwitted fate yet again.

Turns out the movie’s star—Juliette Lewis—showed up unexpectedly at the end of the movie to do a Q&A with the audience. Some kind of buzz-marketing campaign. That was the big delay.

I know my worries were illogical and unhealthy. Stinkin’ thinking, as the professionals say. But my brain adores anxiety and clings to it hard.

A couple of weeks ago, I got some help from a reader named Bella from Portland. She e-mailed me that she’d read an article I wrote in Esquire magazine about outsourcing my life. I’d hired a team of people in Bangalore, India, to answer my phones and return my e-mails.

She wrote: “I was wondering if I could outsource some of my worry to you. You see, I am a high school senior, and I am working on applying to college. I’ve been stressed about where I will or will not get in, and how much financial aid I will receive. I ask because you said it was very comforting to have someone to worry for you. I thought it might calm me down to have someone worry my worries. Now, I have no money to pay you for my worries, but maybe we could make an exchange. I could worry about something for you, and you could worry about college for me. I’m a very good worrier! Almost too good . . .”

She’d worry for me? That’s a great idea. I e-mailed her that she had a deal.

The next day I worried for her about the admissions guy at Vassar, one of the schools to which she applied. What if he had a bad chicken salad sandwich before reading her application? What if he had a fight with his wife? These things are so arbitrary.

She e-mailed me that she was worrying about the looming deadline for my health book.

“Today I worried about the length of February, in terms of how many days you have. But then I remembered that March and January both have an extra day, which makes up for February’s lack, so that calmed me down a bit.”

It’s an absurd exercise. But you know what? Also highly effective. Every time I’d start to stress out about my deadline, I’d remind myself that Bella was on the case. Bella agreed it was working for her, too.

It’s got all the upsides of worry but without the soul-sucking emotional toll. I can’t recommend the worry exchange enough. Julie asked if I was worried whether Bella was cheating and not worrying on my behalf. So I might have to get someone to worry about that.

The Hair of the Dog

There’s a law in New York that adults are forbidden to enter a playground unless they’re accompanied by a child. A grown man can’t just walk in by himself and loiter around the monkey bars.

Fortunately for me, there’s no such statute about dog parks. You don’t need a dog to hang out at dog parks. So I’ve been lurking around this dog run every day. It’s a couple of blocks from our apartment, is about half the size of a soccer field, and has at least several dogs chasing each other in circles, regardless of the weather. I’m hanging out there because petting dogs is healthy. Several studies show it lowers your blood pressure and stress levels.

I spot an elderly man, maybe in his midseventies, sitting on the bench, his Yankees cap tucked low, his caramel-colored Airedale terrier bouncing and sniffing at his feet. I approach.

“You mind if I pet him?” I ask.

The man shrugs.

“Who’s a good boy?” I say, scratching the dog’s head.

“His name’s Logan,” says the man.

“Hi, Logan!”

I smooth the fur on his back.

“You know, petting dogs is good for your heart,” I say. “Lowers our blood pressure.”

“Huh,” says the man. “I’ve had him for three years, and last year I had open-heart surgery and they put in five stents.”

“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.”

I’m not sure what else to say, so I keep patting Logan’s back.

“So you’re saying I didn’t pet him enough?” he asks.

I look up. The man’s not smiling.

“Well, imagine if you hadn’t pet him at all. Maybe you would have had ten stents put in.”

“Hmm. Maybe.”

I couldn’t tell if the man is playfully sparring or unplayfully angry. Was he about to sic Logan on my throat? I felt it was time to move on.

The evidence is solid that pets are good for humans’ health. A study by the Mayo Medical Center found that dog owners had significantly lower cholesterol. A study by the Minnesota Stroke Institute said that people who owned cats were 30 percent less likely to suffer a heart attack (though 40 percent more likely engage in scrapbooking).

There are a lot of possible reasons: Touching lowers stress by raising levels of oxytocin. You’re more active if you have a pet, especially if you have to schlep outside every morning to walk the dog. You meet other pet owners, and form social ties, which are crucial to well-being. Plus there are the benefits of an emotional bond with the animal itself.

As with everything good, pet ownership has its downsides, of course. A 2009 paper published by the Centers for Disease Control warned that sleeping with pets can spread pneumonia, cat scratch fever, meningitis, chagas, and even the bubonic plague.

After the Logan fiasco, I tapered off my visits to the dog park. I can’t always be leeching off other people. My family needs its own pet. The problem is, Julie has allergies, so cats and dogs aren’t going to work.

Instead, we decide on a fur-free pet. I asked Jasper what he wanted: A chameleon, he said. He liked the whole idea of a pet that changed colors. It’s sort of like a slow-moving TV screen, I figure.

We ended up getting a beginner, not-quite-technically-a-chameleon chameleon. It’s called an anole lizard. It only has two colors in its palette: green and brown. Jasper named him Brownie, with Greenie as a seldom-used middle name.

Brownie doesn’t have a huge personality. He eats crickets and takes naps. There’s not going to be an Owen Wilson/Jennifer Aniston movie called Brownie and Me.

But I think it’s worth it. I love the look on Jasper’s face when Brownie scampers up his neck and into his hair. It’s a wonderful mix of joy, tenderness, and disgust. The Germans probably have a word for it, but I don’t know it.

A Relaxing Massage

I often find myself whistling the Monty Python song, “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”

It’s the tune sung by Eric Idle at the end of Life of Brian. He’s on a crucifix alongside twenty other accused criminals, and he warbles: “When you’re chewing on life’s gristle/Don’t grumble, give a whistle . . . Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”

All the stress-busting books keep telling me essentially the same thing: Look on the bright side. “Reframe,” that’s the word they use. Yes, you’re on the slow line at the grocery. But think of all the times you’ve been on the fast line and never noticed it.

Reframing has its limits, and being subjected to the death penalty is one of them. But still, when you’re not being executed, it also has its uses.

I was in the airport going to Sioux Falls on a business trip. I walked through the metal detector with no beeps or flashing lights. But still, the beer-gutted, sideburned TSA guy said, “I need to check you.”

Ugh.

“Can you put your arms out?”

Annoyed, I refused to look him in the face. I was not going to give him that pleasure. I stared over his shoulder and pursed my lips. He patted me on the shoulders. Then the sides of my body.

I was a supernova of negative energy. But for what? Halfway through my pat-down, it occurred to me: I’m spending a lot of my brain’s bandwidth being annoyed. Is it so bad to have this guy touch me? Is he hurting me? He’s just doing his job. In fact, doesn’t the research show that human touch is healthy? It helps fight depression and high blood pressure.

What if I thought of this as a free massage? It’s kind of relaxing when he’s patting my shoulders.

Get the TSA officer some coconut massage oil and a citrus-scented candle, and I’d have to pay him a hundred dollars.

At the end, the guy gave me a friendly pat on the back. A signal that I’m good to go.

“Thanks,” I said. My government-mandated shiatsu may not have lowered my blood pressure, but it probably didn’t raise it either.

Memento Mori

The ultimate reframe, I suppose, is to remind yourself that you’re going to die one day soon, so stop being a petty little bastard. Renaissance painters excelled at these memento mori, and planted little skulls in the corners of their portraits as symbols of our fleeting mortality.

I’ve been a fan of the memento mori concept for a long time. A couple of years ago, I decided to get a memento mori screen saver for my laptop. I downloaded an image of a white bony skull, the kind you see in a Hamlet production. Whenever I opened my computer, there it was, staring at me with its eye sockets. I found it jarring, a buzz kill. Why should imminent death be so gruesome? So I got a more chipper skull. I plucked an image off the Internet of a multicolored, sweetly smiling cartoonlike skull that was probably painted by a Bolinas resident.

The new skull has done a good job over the years of calming me. At least until recently. It now has started to backfire.

Take my latest inconsequential crisis. I did an Esquire interview with this beautiful Colombian actress named Sofia Vergara, who plays the heavily accented, stiletto-heeled young wife on Modern Family. We had coffee, we chatted pleasantly. That’s not the stressful part. During the interview, she went on a rant about how weird Hollywood women look after they’ve had too much plastic surgery. She called Madonna’s cheekbones “crazy.” It seemed funny, and in character, so I put it in the article.

When the article came out, the gossip blogs claimed she had declared a feud with Madonna. Madonna’s fans flooded her with vitriolic e-mails. So what did she do? She denied saying it and tweeted that the reporter (me) was just trying to cause trouble. I started getting calls from Entertainment Tonight about the feud and my part in it.

I was furious. “I can’t believe she claims that I made it up!” I told Julie. “I have it on tape. Why would I make that up? Why would I want to?”

“Why do you care? It’s ridiculous. It’ll go away in a day.”

“No. You don’t understand. The Internet is forever. It’ll never go away.”

She besmirched my reputation, such as it is.

I went back to my office and looked at my smiling-skull painting. It relaxed me a little. But not totally. Because the Internet isn’t the only thing that threatens to go on forever.

As I mentioned, I’m obsessed with these books on immortality. It’s coming soon, possibly in our lifetime, say some scientists. The latest estimate, according to a Time magazine cover story, is 2045. Gene therapy will keep my precious telomeres long and sturdy. Sirtuin will keep my muscles fresh. And Sofia’s accusation will follow me around for thousands of years, like an eternal National Sex Offenders Registry.

Mortality is scary, but there’s a comforting element as well, since you know there’s a limit. Immortality comes with its own set of complications.

Time Management

One of the most stressful parts of my life is the lack of time in my day. Staying healthy is pretty much a full-time job. Consider this partial list of what I have to do every day:

stretching (10 minutes)

meditating (10 minutes)

chewing (10 minutes)

saying the 80 percent mantra before meals (this is where you agree to eat only until you are four-fifths full) (1 minute)

humming (3 minutes)

brushing teeth (4 minutes)

flossing (2 minutes)

keeping a food diary (5 minutes)

putting on moisturizer and sunscreen (2 minutes)

aerobic exercise (45 minutes)

anaerobic exercise (20 minutes)

memorizing word of the day (1 minute)

napping (25 minutes)

reading before sleep (10 minutes)

doing neck exercises (physician and author Nancy Snyderman says we should turn our head side to side five times a day to prevent neck pain) (2 minutes)

airing out apartment (2 minutes)

wiping down germy surfaces such as remote control, cell phone, etc. (5 minutes)

doing crossword puzzle and other brain exercises (20 minutes)

taking stairs instead of elevator (2 minutes)

walking instead of taking the bus or cab (20 minutes)

steaming vegetables (20 minutes)

grilling salmon (20 minutes)

making salad (20 minutes)

putting on/taking off earphones repeatedly (1 minute)

spending time on social interactions (1 hour)

scrubbing vegetables to get off chemical and bacterial residue (3 minutes)

taking supplements, including omega-3 fish oil; vitamin B¹²; and coenzyme Q10 (3 minutes)

paying respect to older self (1 minute)

petting dogs (5 minutes)

refilling water purifier (1 minute)

having sex (not every day, and amount of time spent is classified, per Julie)

checking pedometer (3 minutes)

writing list of things for which grateful (3 minutes)

getting ultraviolet light treatment with Philips GoLite Blu Sunlight Therapy to prevent seasonal affective disorder (15 minutes)

drinking glass of wine (10 minutes)

I’m always looking for ways to shave time from my schedule. One of the greatest days of my life? The day I figured out how to make podcasts play at double speed on my iPhone. It works great with NPR. I also enjoy listening to a full-body relaxation course on double speed—“now-relax-your-toes-now-relax-your-calves,” though perhaps it defeats the purpose.

My time deficiency is why I was excited to read about a newish fitness trend: the hyperefficient workout. Twenty minutes a week. Not twenty minutes a day. Twenty minutes a week.

Welcome news.

On a Tuesday, I take the bus down to another eccentrically capitalized place, InForm Fitness, home of the fastest workout in the land. I climb the stairs to the second floor of a building in midtown Manhattan, a space once occupied by a tuxedo shop. When I open the heavy wooden door, I find the quietest gym I’ve ever been to. No blaring Black Eyed Peas songs. No sweaty Lycra-clad runners pounding away on whirring treadmills. No clanging barbells. It’s like working out at an ashram.

The floor is home to a collection of sleek, white weight machines. Three other clients are lifting. And I don’t see a drop of sweat on anyone’s face. One gray-haired businessman is doing shoulder presses in his oxford shirt, his tie slung over his shoulder. My kind of gym.

The owner is a man named Adam Zickerman, a broad-chested former medical equipment salesman and longtime trainer.

Here’s his theory in a nutshell: The key to being in shape is to exhaust your muscles. Push them to failure so they can rebuild. Cardio is one way to do that: You can exhaust your legs by running three miles. But that’s inefficient, plus there are dangers (knee problems, for instance). The best way to exhaust a muscle? By lifting heavy weights superslowly for about two minutes at a time once a week. You’ll stay in shape, get toned, and lose weight.

It’s a startling notion. But one I don’t want to dismiss outright: There are several hundred trainers in America doing slow-cadence training, and they have the support of a handful of academics.

I meet Adam in his office, and we talk fitness under the watchful gaze of a framed photo of Albert Einstein. I love Adam, partly for his enthusiasm, and partly because he’s prone to making sweeping statements, always good for a journalist.

“Aerobics is a creaking edifice,” he declares.

To him, mainstream exercise theory is deluded. It’s based on superstition, cobwebbed tradition, and pseudoscience. It’s like creationism, but with lactic acid and electrolytes.

One of the major villains of our time, according to Adam, is Jane Fonda, but not for her support of North Vietnam. “When we look back, I believe we’ll know Jane Fonda and her ilk as the people who destroyed America’s knees.” He laughs, knowing he sounds extreme.

But he continues: “Why would you spend six to twelve hours on cardio, when you can get the same exact thing in twenty minutes once a week?”

Cardio defenders are fitness Luddites. “It’s like saying that the only way to type a letter is with a typewriter. You could argue, ‘When I was in college, I used a typewriter and I got through fine.’ Yeah, it got the job done. But why the F would you use it when you have a word processor?”

Adam started his gym on Long Island in 1997, and over the years, has gotten an avalanche of publicity. He wrote a New York Times bestseller called the Power of 10. He’s been profiled in GQ and The New York Times, and featured on 48 Hours.

Talking to Adam, I can see why. You can’t help but get swept up. He’s got preacherlike charisma. He speaks of the “fetishization of the Krebs cycle” and how aerobics release dangerous free radicals. He stands behind his desk and thrusts his arms in the air to make a point.

After an hour, he stops. “I think I pontificated enough for now. We should work out.”

Off we go to the workout room. I sit down at a leg extension weight machine. We won’t have to do the three typical sets of fifteen lifts. We can do it all in one shot. I’ll simply lift eighty pounds slowly till I can’t stand it any longer.

“Ten seconds up, ten seconds down. And then repeat. Your goal is to reach muscle failure. You’ll be out of this freakin’ torturous machine in a minute and a half.”

I push on the foot platform with my sneakers.

“A little slower,” he says.

I slow down to octogenarian speed, the speed of Keanu Reeves doing kung fu in The Matrix.

“That’s perfect.”

I’m pushing hard. Without the momentum to help me, the weights kill my legs. I glance at Adam. “Don’t look at me for sympathy,” he says. He adds, mockingly, “Mommy, it burns!”

But, Mommy, it does burn. It’s like having the flu and an eight-martini hangover in my thighs. I grimace and keep pushing. My legs start to shake.

Finally, Adam counts down five-four-three-two-one . . . and I’m allowed to let the weights down.

“Thank you for that,” he says. I had gone all the way to muscle failure. “Failure is success,” he says.

I do five more grimace-inducing exercises—including shoulder, biceps, and chest—and say good-bye to Adam till next week.

When I get home, I boast to Julie that I just did all my exercises for the week. She should try it instead of sweating on the elliptical every day at the gym.

“You’re saying that what I do is bad?”

“Well, it’s probably inefficient. And hurting your joints.”

I expected her to roll her eyes, and maybe agree to give InForm Fitness a shot. But Julie is angry. Attacking aerobics is sacrilege, like taking on her family or her beloved Philippa Gregory novels.

“You find one study that says aerobics is bad, and you latch onto that one!”

When Julie is mad, she stomps. When she leaves the room, I hear the glass table rattle.

I went to Adam’s gym a few more times, but in the end, I decide Julie has a point. I have to continue cardio.

First, frankly, it’d be a little anticlimactic for my project to settle on a once-a-week workout. It feels like cheating, like taking a funicular up Mount Everest. It reminds me of what Adam said when I told him he should be a consultant on The Biggest Loser. “It’s not good for TV. Twenty minutes and it’s over. Okay, see you next week.” No drama. No sweat equity.

Second, the science behind slow fitness isn’t solid enough for me, at least not yet. It may turn out to be true. It’s not inconceivable. But it needs more study. I pray it pans out. I’m all in favor of shortcuts.

Stress-Free Friendship

“I’m taking Alison out to cheer her up,” says Julie.

Alison is sweet. She’s been one of my wife’s best friends since second grade. They bonded over their mutual love of Charleston Chews and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Alison happens to be going through a tough stretch. Her partner died seven years ago, and she hasn’t dated since. Then her cat died. Then her other cat died.

“We’re having dinner at about six-thirty.”

“That’s nice,” I say.

“Do you want to come?”

I pause. “It might not be the healthiest thing for me.”

My dilemma: Hanging out with a close-knit group of friends is healthy. But what kind of friends? To be truly healthy, some research indicates you want fit and happy friends. Your social circle has enormous influence on your own behavior.

Obesity, for one, is socially contagious, argue some scientists. A 2007 study in The New England Journal of Medicine found that a person’s chances of becoming obese increased by 57% if he or she had a friend who becomes obese, 40% if they have a sibling who becomes obese, and 37% if a spouse becomes obese.

Surprisingly, the scientists claim this correlation was true even if the friends or family members were hundreds of miles away. The same study suggested that losing weight is also socially contagious.

Not that Alison is overweight. She’s svelte. But the same two researchers (Nicholas Christakis from Harvard, and James Fowler from the University of California–San Diego) posit that happiness is similarly contagious. Happiness, they say, spreads like a virus even among people not in direct contact.

A happy friend increases your chances of being happy by 15 percent.

A happy friend of a friend boosts your chances by 10 percent.

And a happy friend of a friend of a friend lifts your odds by 6 percent.

The study is controversial. But if you think there’s a grain of truth to it, maybe you should avoid associating with anyone who is sad or pudgy. Maybe I should cut ties with my friend who hates his job. Or my other friend whose husband left her for a coworker. Or anyone with a BMI over thirty.

Maybe I should skip dinner with Alison. That’d make sense in a cold-blooded Spock-like world, right?

But it’ll also make me feel like a bastard. And just as important, when I’m depressed and fat, as I’m sure I’ll be sometime in the next decade, I’ll need the support of my friends, all of them, no matter what their waist size or serotonin level.

I don’t explain my thinking to Julie, who has lowered her gaze and is looking at me over the top of her glasses.

I just say: “Yeah, I’ll come. Looking forward to it.”

Checkup: Month 10

Weight: 157

Bottles of flaxseed oil consumed this month: 2

Trips to Whole Foods this month: 8

Pounds lifted on squat machine (15 reps): 300

Minutes of TV watched per day: 60

Minutes of TV watched per day while standing: 30

Project Health continues to startle me with unintended consequences. This month’s surprise: I’ve actually begun watching professional sports.

The last time I paid much attention to team sports was when I was a kid—the year my dad took me to the legendary Game Six of the 1977 World Series. He made us leave in the seventh inning to beat the traffic. “But what if Reggie Jackson hits a third home run, Dad?” “Don’t worry. He won’t.” On the upside, we did have the subway all to ourselves.

But now that I’m feeling more connected to those parts of me below the neck, I’ve rediscovered spectator sports. I want to see how Amar’e Stoudemire of the Knicks sprints and jumps. I want to study how Roger Federer snaps his wrist on the serve.

This renewed interest dovetails with my sons’ innate obsession with watching men bounce and throw spheroid objects.

Jasper and I tuned in to the Jets in the play-offs recently. And when they scored, Jasper laughed like Ray Liotta in Goodfellas, and I laughed with him, and we stomped triumphantly around the living room, doing coyote howls. So this is what all the fuss is about, I remember thinking. I’d forgotten the joys of tribalism. I’d forgotten the deep irrational pleasure of belonging to an arbitrary group.

As with everything I do now, the question arises: Is it healthy?

Maybe not. A study of German soccer fans found that heart attacks in men more than tripled during the World Cup on days the German team played. The stress is too much.

But another study, published in The Journal of Clinical Hypertension, says that it might depend on which sport you watch. Football raises the blood pressure, but baseball lowers it. The latter’s nineteenth-century pace puts us into near-coma states.

And there’s one more health benefit: Watching sports may be good for your brain. In a 2008 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, psychologist Sian Beilock says that spectators’ spatial reasoning and language skills improve when they watch sports. Which brings me to . . .