Author fleshes out his body of work
Jacobs flexes in the last of his ‘triathlon’
NEW YORK — At a gym called Crunch, author and former couch potato A.J. Jacobs is doing bicep curls with a 20-pound barbell in each hand.
That’s not going to get him into any bodybuilding contests, but that’s not the point of Jacobs’ latest book, Drop Dead Healthy: One Man’s Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection (Simon & Schuster, $26), on sale today.
Between exercises, Jacobs, 44, stresses the word humble in his subtitle, not perfection.
“My old body was a fixer-upper,” he says at the gym, near his apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. His 26-month rehab project, chronicled in the book, taught him that “bodily perfection is a bit of a myth. Because you have huge biceps doesn’t mean you’re perfect.”
Drop Dead Healthy is the third book in Jacobs’ literary “triathlon devoted to upgrading my mind, my spirit and my body.” First came The Know-it All (2004), about reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica, all 32 volumes. In The Year of Living
Biblically (2007), he tried to live according to the Good Book, down to the rule “Don’t shave your beard.”
Jacobs has since shed his “Ted Kaczynski-like facial hair.” But even after all his workouts, research and consultations with experts, Jacobs acknowledges his physique won’t get him on Jersey Shore, “which I’m OK with. But I’m a lot healthier.” His book recounts his first day at the gym, when he told trainer Tony Willging: “I need to bulk up. I want pecs that would fill a set of B-cups.”
Willging told him, “That’s not necessarily the same thing as being in shape.”
Three years later, Jacobs’ pecs would fit A-cups — “not the most manly image,” he says — but he has learned to follow Oscar Wilde’s advice: “Be moderate in all things, including moderation.”
The old Jacobs avoided beef, pork and lamb but ate lots of pasta and corn-syrupy cereal and rarely had anything green at his meals, “not counting bottles of Rolling Rock.”
The new Jacobs eats mostly vegetables and weaned himself off sugar. “A little sugar is OK,” he says. “But Americans eat far too much. And in larger doses, it’s a huge health hazard. Some doctors call it a poison.”
The old Jacobs got winded playing hide-and-seek with his three sons (ages 8 to 5).
The new Jacobs can run a mile in less than seven minutes. (For readers keeping score, that’s a bit slower than the world record for 80-year-olds.) He keeps a pedometer clipped to his pants to measure steps. His daily goal: 10,000.
The old Jacobs wasn’t fat — at 5-foot-11 he weighed 172 pounds. But his stomach formed what he calls “a python-thatswallowed-a-goat type of body.” That, he learned, “is the worst kind of fat” — visceral fat that surrounds the liver and other vital organs.
The new Jacobs, now 156½ pounds, knows that the size of your waistline is one of the best predictors of heart disease. His dropped by 3 inches. Prodded into action
His “Project Health” began three years ago when he was hospitalized for three days with severe pneumonia.
His wife, Julia, who for years has worked out at a gym, nudged him about his expanding belly. She called him “Buddha” and warned him: “I don’t want to be a widow at 45.”
All of that launched Jacobs, who majored in philosophy at Brown University, into his latest “radical self-improvement project,” as he puts it.
Jacobs is an editor at large at Esquire magazine, where he does “very little editing, but a lot of at-large, which means I get to write from home in my sweatpants.”
His at-home workplace was inspired by Mayo Clinic doctor James Levine, who believes we should all have desks in front of treadmills. Jacobs jury-rigged his, joining what he says is a “small but loyal following of treadmill desk jockeys” who use terms like “deskercise” and “iplod.” Jacobs calculates he walked 1,200 miles while writing his book.
The old Jacobs “loved to sit. I was a champion sitter. I spent 14 hours a day sitting. Now, I find if I walk more, I have more ener-
“I try to put myself in interesting situations. I have little shame, no dignity.”
gy.” And when he runs errands, he actually runs.
He gets 45 minutes of aerobic exercise a day and visits the gym three times a week. At the gym, he lifts weights and jogs on a treadmill for 30 minutes at 6 or 7 mph. Or, if he’s doing highintensity interval training, he runs at 10 mph for a minute, then rests for a minute, repeating that for up to 20 minutes.
Yet, he says, “you can be maximally healthy without going to the gym. You just have to incorporate exercise into every part of your life.”
He describes himself as a “committed experimental journalist,” who defies the adage that the reporter is not the story.
“I don’t like to write just about myself,” he says. He has no plans for a conventional memoir: “My childhood was not that interesting. My father wasn’t a spy, an alcoholic or a rodeo clown,” just a New York lawyer.
He uses himself as a lens on topics he finds interesting. “I try to put myself in interesting situations. I have little shame, no dignity — all in the name of a better cause.” (At Crunch, he was the only man in a poledancing class, which he reports has nothing to do with stripping, “aside from the technicality that
A.J. Jacobs
95% of pole dancing takes place at strip clubs.”)
He mixes his reporting with humor. “I think they used to call it edu-tainment. Like serving broccoli with your cotton candy. Not that I would eat cotton candy.”
After his workout, he actually eats broccoli for lunch at a nearby vegan cafe. It’s hard to eat healthy
But there’s a problem. Jacobs notes that Peacefood Cafe got a grade of B from health inspectors. During his project, he ate only at restaurants that got an A.
He decides to risk it, reminded of one of the doctors he consulted, Steven Bratman, who found what he calls a new eating disorder: “orthorexia nervosa,” defined as an unhealthy obsession with healthy foods.
In that spirit, lunch is eaten at the café, despite its B health grade. Jacobs orders the $11.95 plate of four vegetables: roasted brussels sprouts and sautéed broccoli, squash and kale.
Between bites, Jacobs says it’s healthier to eat slowly, which is why he uses chopsticks, and to chew more. (His book describes a movement called Chewdaism.) He cites advice from Timothy Ferriss, best-selling au- thor of The 4-Hour Body: “Don’t eat white stuff unless you want to get fatter.”
In 2006, Ferriss, who sold nutritional supplements, called Jacobs. He wanted writing advice and permission to run an excerpt from an Esquire article Jacobs wrote about outsourcing his life. A year later, he hit it big with The 4-Hour Workweek.
Ferriss says Jacobs “was generous and helpful. He showed me there’s an audience for the kinds of things we do — that sometimes amateurs can explore and explain things better than the experts.”
Jacobs has a few “half-baked and quarter-baked” ideas for his next book, perhaps something about capitalism. “I’ve never been that savvy with money, so maybe I could try that route.”
He eats only half his lunch. The uneaten vegetables go home with him, although he walks, he doesn’t run.