Seth's Blog

The newly-released climate scientist emails (called Climategate 2.0) from University of East Anglia (Phil Jones) and elsewhere (Michael Mann and others) show that top climate scientists agree with me. Like me (see my posts on global warming), they think the evidence that humans have caused dangerous global warming is weaker than claimed. Unfortunately for the rest of us, they kept their doubts to themselves: “I just refused to give an exclusive interview to SPIEGEL because I will not cause damage for climate science.”

This is a big reason I have found self-experimentation useful. It showed me that experts exaggerate, that they overstate their certainty. At first I was shocked. My first useful self-experimental results were about acne. I found that one of the two drugs my dermatologist had prescribed didn’t work. He hadn’t said This might not work. He didn’t try to find out if it worked. He appeared surprised (and said “why did you do that?”) when I told him it didn’t work. Another useful self-experimental result was breakfast caused me to wake up too early. Breakfast is widely praised by dieticians (“the most important meal of the day”). I have never heard a dietician say It could hurt your sleep or even a modest There’s a lot we don’t know. My discoveries about morning faces and mood are utterly different than what psychiatrists and psychotherapists say about depression.

As anyone paying attention has noticed, it isn’t just climate scientists, doctors, dieticians, psychiatrists, and psychotherapists. How can you tell when an expert is exaggerating? His lips move. There are two types of journalism: 1. Trusts experts. 2. Doesn’t trust experts. I suggest using colored headlines to make them easy to distinguish: red = trusts experts, green = doesn’t trust experts.

A reader of this blog started taking flaxseed oil, half a stick of butter daily, and yogurt. “This works wonders,” he wrote me. “It feels like lubricant to the mind.”

When The Shangri-La Diet was published (2006), I enjoyed checking its Amazon rank. The rank got worse. I checked less often. Eventually it was usually above 100,000 and I barely checked at all.

A few months ago, I noticed it was much better than I expected — maybe 40,000. How did that happen? Were sales improving? To find out, I subscribed to RankTracer, which records Amazon rank every hour and plots the results. (more…)

For an article about self-experimentation and self-tracking to appear in Men’s Fitness UK this summer, Mark Bailey sent me several questions.

In what ways have the results of your self-experimentation directly affected your daily life e.g. health / work / lifestyle changes?

1. Acne. My dermatologist prescribed two medicines. I found that one worked , the other didn’t.
2. Weight. Found new ways to lose weight (e.g., nose-clipping).
3. Sleep. Found new ways to sleep more deeply, avoid early awakening (e.g., one-legged standing).
4. Mood, energy, serenity. Found that morning faces make me more cheerful, more energetic, and more serene.
5. Productivity. After I started to track when I was working, I discovered that a certain feedback system made me work more, goof off less.
6. Inflammation. Self-experimentation led me to take flaxseed oil. In the right dose — which I determined via self-experimentation — it greatly reduces inflammation. As a result, my gums are pink instead of red. They no longer bleed when I floss.
7. Balance, reflexes. Flaxseed oil improved my balance and quickened my reflexes — I catch what I would have dropped.
8. Blood sugar. I found that walking a lot improves my blood sugar level.
9. Mental clarity. I found that flaxseed oil and butter improve how well my brain works in several ways.

Changes 1-6 are/were obvious. The rest are more subtle.

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On my Psychology Today blog someone left a surprising comment about why the Shangri-La Diet isn’t more popular:

Seth, I’ll tell you why. Because we are majorly competitive bitches, we women who care about our appearance. I’m 41, I have three children and I am a size 6. I fit into my wedding dress and the jeans I wore in college. How? Shangri-La. And there is no way in hell I am going to share my secret with anyone.

Went to the movies this weekend with a group of friends. They had the usual movie fare, I ordered a cup of tea (bag on the side), added two tablespoons of sugar (put the teabag in my purse for later), sipped it slowly throughout the movie, had not ONE craving for the popcorn or nachos or M&M’s everyone else was scarfing. I went home and had a light dinner and felt terrific!

Sounds more like an ad than an actual comment, but it could hardly be more vivid and I believe it.