The 2011 documentary Forks Over Knives had lots of testimonials.  Has anyone done any follow ups to see where they are years later?

I’m not a professional blogger.  I’m just a guy that had been doing quantitative self (QS) type stuff, has an interest in overall health and longevity (albeit not with as much discipline in the follow through as I would like), and decided to write this in a blog format rather than just use a personal journal.  My thought that maybe someone could find this information was a bonus.  It turns out that I’m the one who is finding this information useful several times recently.

While using the Goal Accountability Project as a means of keeping myself honest on where I am with my health it occurred to me that a graphical punch is as important as a daily check in.  It’s one thing to look at a table of numbers and see that I haven’t been hitting the marks I want.  However it is of far greater impact when you see a picture of it.  As the old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Phase 1 of 2017’s Goal Accountability project was a disaster, as I chronicled here .  Phase 1 ended weak, really non-existent adherence, which rolled into Phase 2 beginning equally weak; but I got my butt in gear one week in and finished it strong!

When I wrote about kicking off 2017 (link ) with a new push for goal accountability I specifically stated that it wasn’t a new years resolution and that those don’t work for me anyway.  If my performance in the first phase isn’t a pointed tail of that I don’t know what is.

At the beginning of January I decided to try my hand at using a ten year old laptop running Linux Mint MATE as my daily at home machine . While there is certainly some cruft associated with using such an old machine for the most part the experience was perfectly fine.  In fact I’m using it right now to write out this article.  I wouldn’t recommend running out and buying one solely for the purpose, but the fact remains that Linux Mint MATE, and probably Ubuntu MATE as well, provide a great average user load experience on underpowered hardware.

A link showed up on my Facebook news feed with this article , talking about the all too common practice of doctors pushing stents treatment  that don’t actually save our live for people who don’t need them.  I happened to have been listening to this podcast earlier today talking about the same thing when it comes to prostate screenings, cholesterol medicine, etc.  Both try to address the “why” of these things to varying degrees.  There is the cynical “because there’s money in it” or “the Doctors are too arrogant/too busy/too brainwashed/too much in CYA mode.”  I’m sure those elements play varying degrees case by case but I think there is more of an overriding reason we get these treatments, and that’s because we want them.

I’ve been a huge convert to Linux Mint and Ubuntu for several years now.  In the last year I went so far as to be running Linux as my bare metal OS on both my work laptop and home desktop.  I’ve never had an update for Mint or Ubuntu get so borked up that the UI refused to function properly…until now.

“Getting fit” is often synonymous with “losing weight” in most discussions.  Back when I was setting up this blog for a long term eating style experiment I was in pretty good shape.  My strength training was a bit of a crap shoot but my cardio was as tuned in for me as it had ever been; I ran my first (and to date only) marathon at the end of that planning period.  I therefore didn’t see it as a weight loss experiment but as a fitness and longevity experiment.  I therefore sought to quantify my fitness in as concrete a way I could.  What I came up with was holding myself to a military fitness standard (link ).