7-Minute Workout

This workout is getting a lot of buzz everywhere.  It was originally printed in the ACSM Journal, and the NY Times has picked it up as well.  I just tried it and broke a sweat very quickly:

You do each exercise in the routine for 30 seconds with 10 seconds rest in between each exercise.  Great, I think, for those days when you know you have very little time.

Philosophy for Life

My best friend and her husband have a philosophy for life that involves 4 tenets:

• Be happy.
• Do the right thing.
• Help others.
• Expect success.

Simple but spot on.

8 Signs You’re A Food Nerd

From:  ZAGAT.COM

 

Fancy kitchen gear = a food nerd essential

To the everyday eater, the term food nerd might seem like an insult. Nope. True, this brand of avid diner may take their love of obscure ingredients a little too far (mmm – salsify) and overload on pictures at the dinner table (fact, you just can’t make headcheese look good), but food nerdiness is a badge of honor. These gastronomic geeks may be extreme, but their exacting standards raise quality across the boards.

 

Photo Mania

Because what fun is being a food nerd if you can’t document it for everyone to see (and by “everyone,” we mean your social media followers). Everyone we asked agreed that excessive photography is sign numero uno of nerdinesss. One reader said the title dictated that your friends should “know better than to start eating before you’ve Instagrammed it.” If you’ve lost all shame for setting off your flash at a crowded restaurant (and if you lose track of the conversation because you’re too busy checking how many people liked your update), you’re on the path to proper geekery.

Fancy Condiment Fanaticism

If you’re looking to identify a food nerd, take them to the condiments counter. Once they reach for sriracha, bingo – nerdiness confirmed. Regular ketchup and mustard just don’t cut it anymore – food nerds slather this spicy sweet Thai sauce on pretty much everything. If you use a non-Heinz ketchup or stone ground dijon, you may just be a geek deep down.

Meat Heritage Obsession

The more you want to know about the source of your meat, the more nerd you have lurking underneath. Pork? Boring. How about mangelista pig that was raised on a local farm and only fed acorns for the last two months that it was alive? True geeks will also have a deep appreciation for the custom meat blends in their burgers. For example, nerd-level carnivores know that the Black Label burger at New York’s Minetta Tavern wouldn’t be as tasty without just the right blend of skirt steak, brisket and New York strip in that patty.

You’re a Food Truck Follower

Food nerds know that food trucks rock – if you have had days when you score more than one meal from a mobile eatery, chances are you fall into this category. Another piece of evidence that your love of eating on the go may bring you into the geek category is your social feeds. If you use Twitter to stay on top of the trucks, and will up and run from wherever you are when you find out one is close to you, you might as well hashtag #FoodNerd when you at-reply them to say you’re coming.

Proper Gear

There’s two places to look when your snooping around someone’s pad trying to determine their food nerd cred: the kitchen counter and the bookshelf. In the kitchen, you have to look for tricked-out gear that you think seems like it would rarely have the occasion for use. The more expensive, the more devoted you are to geekery  An at-home sous-vide machine is the perfect example – shiny, not that functional and expensive. The bookshelf is similar – the heavier the instructional tomes, the better, with Nathan Myhrvold’s Modernist Cuisine being the food nerd’s ultimate bible.

You Have a Restaurant Bucket List

Hitting every new restaurant that’s worth going to is pretty much impossible, but that doesn’t mean you can’t try. Food nerds are passionate about going out, and they are always looking for new place to hit. Once a new hole-in-the-wall Thai joint or crazy-expensive fine-dining establishment is found, it goes on the list. The selection of potential restaurants is always getting updated, and by its ever-expanding nature it’s impossible to hit every one. When looking for a place to go on a random night, they will consult the list (and new friends with similar tastes will compare lists to make plans).

Those that take food geekery to the extreme will peruse their list, not find anything appealing and continue to look for new options elsewhere.

Cocktail Geekery

Whether you’re making basil gimlets at your home bar on a Monday evening or debating Campari vs. Aperol at a high-end lounge with a mustachioed bartender, a fine appreciation of cocktail culture is pretty much a sure sign of food nerd-ness. To be fair, cocktail geeks are not always food nerds – some liquid lovers don’t care about anything other than what’s in their glass. But, if you’re trying to elevate what’s in your glass to the level of a dish you’d order at your favorite restaurant – nerd alert!

Discretionary Income, and Then Some

If you’re still doubting your food-nerd status, look at your bank account. If you’ve paid rent a few days late because you wanted to splurge on that impossible-to-get reservation or if you’ve racked up the bills paying for ingredients like starfruit and saffron at Whole Foods, chances are that you’re laying out the dough to satisfy your inner geek. If you go to a restaurant and you think it’s no big deal to spend $4 extra for them to put fresh ramps on your salad, chances are your wallet will be bare, but your cupboards anything but. Food geekery is expensive – cha-ching!

Quote of the Day

Because homemade beats the drive thru — hands down

Some new ideas from the Brooklyn lunch counter Saltie:

The Clean Slate

Spread naan or pita with hummus.  Top with cooked quinoa; yogurt mixed with scallions and dill; sauerkraut; sliced pickled or roasted beets; shredded carrots; mixed fresh herbs of your choice, and sesame seeds.

The Scuttlebutt

Spread mayo mixed with smoked paprika on sliced foccacia, ciabatta, or a baquette.  Top with sliced hard boiled eggs; pitted, oil cured olives; capers; fresh herbs of choice; sliced pickled beets; and sliced radish.  Drizzle with olive oil and finish with feta.

The Little Chef

Spread green olive tapenade on crusty Italian bread or focaccia.  Top with mortadello, thinly sliced pecorino Toscano, fresh basil, and a drizzle of olive oil.

Money and happiness

This is a long read but worth it!  HOW much money do you need to be happy? Think about it. What’s your number?

Many of us aren’t satisfied with how much we have now. That’s why we’re constantly angling for a raise at work, befriending aged relatives and springing, despite long odds, for lottery scratch tickets.

Is it crazy to question how much money you need to be happy? The notion that money can’t buy happiness has been around a long time — even before yoga came into vogue. But it turns out there is a measurable connection between income and happiness; not surprisingly, people with a comfortable living standard are happier than people living in poverty.

The catch is that additional income doesn’t buy us any additional happiness on a typical day once we reach that comfortable standard. The magic number that defines this “comfortable standard” varies across individuals and countries, but in the United States, it seems to fall somewhere around $75,000. Using Gallup data collected from almost half a million Americans, researchers at Princeton found that higher household incomes were associated with better moods on a daily basis — but the beneficial effects of money tapered off entirely after the $75,000 mark.

Why, then, do so many of us bother to work so hard long after we have reached an income level sufficient to make most of us happy? One reason is that our ideas about the relationship between money and happiness are misguided. In research we conducted with a national sample of Americans, people thought that their life satisfaction would double if they made $55,000 instead of $25,000: more than twice as much money, twice as much happiness. But our data showed that people who earned $55,000 were just 9 percent more satisfied than those making $25,000. Nine percent beats zero percent, but it’s still kind of a letdown when you were expecting a 100 percent return.

Interestingly, and usefully, it turns out that what we do with our money plays a far more important role than how much money we make. Imagine three people each win $1 million in the lottery. Suppose one person attempts to buy every single thing he has ever wanted; one puts it all in the bank and uses the money only sparingly, for special occasions; and one gives it all to charity. At the end of the year, they all would report an additional $1 million of income. Many of us would follow the first person’s strategy, but the latter two winners are likely to get the bigger happiness bang for their buck.

We usually think of having more money as allowing us to buy more and more of the stuff we like for ourselves, from bigger houses to fancier cars to better wine to more finely pixilated televisions. But these typical spending tendencies — buying more, and buying for ourselves — are ineffective at turning money into happiness. A decade of research has demonstrated that if you insist on spending money on yourself, you should shift from buying stuff (TVs and cars) to experiences (trips and special evenings out). Our own recent research shows that in addition to buying more experiences, you’re better served in many cases by simply buying less — and buying for others.

Indulgence is often closely trailed by its chubby sidekick, overindulgence. While the concept of overindulgence is probably all too familiar to anyone who’s ever attended a Thanksgiving dinner, the word “underindulgence” doesn’t exist. (Type it into Dictionary.com, and you’ll be asked, “Did you mean counter intelligence?”) But research shows that underindulgence — indulging a little less than you usually do — holds one key to getting more happiness for your money.

In a recent study conducted by our student Jordi Quoidbach, chocolate lovers ate a piece of this confection — and then pledged to abstain from chocolate for one week. Another group pledged to eat as much chocolate as they comfortably could and were even given a mammoth two-pound bag of chocolate to help them meet this “goal.”

If you love chocolate, you might think that the students who absconded with the chocolaty loot had it made. But they paid a price. When they returned the next week for another chocolate tasting, they enjoyed that chocolate much less than they had the week before. The only people who enjoyed the chocolate as much the second week as they had the first? Those who had given it up in between. Underindulging — temporarily giving up chocolate, even when we have the cash to buy all we want — can renew our enjoyment of the things we love.

The value of underindulgence casts a different light on the current debate over restricting sugary sodas. Driven by the childhood-obesity crisis, many school districts around the country have banished soda from their campuses. Leaving aside the potential health benefits of these initiatives, banning soda for a large chunk of the day may actually improve its taste. Researchers at Arizona State University demonstrated that people enjoy soda significantly more when they can’t have it right away. (The effect doesn’t hold for prune juice, a beverage that rarely incites overindulgence.)

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s recent proposal to ban giant-size soda in New York City offers another intriguing route to underindulgence. Happiness research shows that, as the food writer Michael Pollan put it, “The banquet is in the first bite.” That first sip of soda really is delicious, catching our tongues by surprise with its bubbly sweetness. But our tongues and our minds quickly get used to repeated pleasures, and so the 39th sip is not as delightful as the first. Because limiting the size of sodas curtails these less pleasurable sips, Mayor Bloomberg’s proposal may improve our pleasure-to-calorie (and pleasure-to-coin) ratio, an overlooked benefit in the heated debate about the consequences of such initiatives for our freedom and our health.

USING your money to promote underindulgence requires a shift in behavior, for sure. But another scientifically validated means of increasing the happiness you get from your money is even more radical: not using it on yourself at all.

Imagine walking down the street to work and being approached by our student Lara Aknin, who hands you an envelope. You open the envelope and find $20 and a slip of paper, which tells you to spend the cash on something for yourself by the end of the day. Sounds like a pretty sweet deal. Now imagine instead that the slip of paper told you to spend the cash on someone else. Being generous is nice, sure, but would using the money to benefit someone else actually make you happier than buying yourself the belt, DVD or apps you’ve been dying to get?

Yes, and it’s not even close. When we follow up with people who receive cash from us, those whom we told to spend on others report greater happiness than those told to spend on themselves. And in countries from Canada to India to South Africa, we find that people are happier when they spend money on others rather than on themselves.

But what about individuals who are notorious for their struggles with sharing? Surely the emotional benefits of giving couldn’t possibly apply to very young children, who cling to their possessions as though their lives depended on it. To find out, we teamed up with the developmental psychologist Kiley Hamlin and gave toddlers the baby-equivalent of gold: goldfish crackers. Judging from their beaming faces, they were pretty happy about this windfall. But something made them even happier. They were happiest of all when giving some of their treats away to their new friend, a puppet named Monkey. Monkey puppets aside, the lesson is clear: maximizing our happiness is not about maximizing our goldfish. To be clear, having more goldfish (or more gold) doesn’t decrease our happiness — those first few crackers may provide a genuine burst of delight. But rather than focusing on how much we’ve got in our bowl, we should think more carefully about what we do with what we’ve got — which might mean indulging less, and may even mean giving others the opportunity to indulge instead.

The Perfect Reading Chair

1. Cappellini’s Capo Chair

With its slightly pitched seat, Capo is a chair that you lean back in. Designer Doshi Levien gave the chair flat armrests that splay outward. Because the armrests start out narrow and get wider as they move away from you, they’re not ideal for typing on, but they do give you a convenient spot to rest your laptop or tablet. Like your tablet, the Capo appears impossibly light—it’s little more than legs and upholstery. The designers compare the chair’s high walls to an upturned collar. Understandably, the sides are not so tall that you can’t see over them when seated, and they’re rigid but offer a bit of give. Even without walling you off, though, Capo lets you opt for privacy. Turn Capo’s back to the room (it’s light enough to do this easily), and there’s no mistaking that you’d prefer not to be disturbed. $5,000,cappellini.it

2. Blå Station’s Innovation C

The Innovation C may look like it was designed for intergalactic space travel, but the chair can complement grand, traditional spaces as well. (I first came across these chairs in the centuries-old, medieval Salaborsa Library in Bologna, Italy, where they dot the periphery of the ground floor.) Its novel shape—essentially two parallel planes—also happens to be practical. What’s most innovative about Innovation C is its open-endedness. Instead of a vertical seat back, Innovation C’s goes horizontal, offering a comfortable place to rest your elbows when you’re leaning back (no bulky armrests required). Swivel the chair around so the seat back is in front of you and you’ve got a surface on which to rest your laptop or book (it’s set at the perfect height for working) or lean on while making a phone call. $4,525, blastation.com

3. Jayson Home’s Canopy Chair

Lest you assume all visually and acoustically isolating seating to be a product of the iPod age, behold the Canopy Chair. It’s a reproduction of a “porter’s chair,” which hails from the 16th century. Back in the day, the hall porter would hunker down in one of these; the high seat back and sides protected him from front-door drafts, while the hooded headrest helped him stay attuned to distant sounds. Its signature headrest is just as practical today. The “hoodie” is kind of like holding your hands up to your ears: In noisy environments, it makes conversations more intelligible; in quieter places, chatting with someone feels more intimate. If the burlap and exposed brass nailheads of this reproduction aren’t your style, there are other equivalents. Jaime Hayon’s Showtime Poltrona for BD Barcelona is a sleeker, but no less spectacular version, and it comes in glossy indoor and matte outdoor versions. $1,895, jaysonhome.com

4. Moroso’s Take a Line for a Walk

If walling yourself off from the rest of the room is too extreme, designer Alfredo Häberli’s Take a Line for a Walk strikes a good balance between intro- and extroversion. As with Arne Jacobsen’s iconic Egg Chair (the midcentury classic that this chair evokes with more angular lines), the generously proportioned seat encourages you to curl up, while the enveloping headrest gives you a sense of separation without coming off as anti-social. It does an exceptional job of blocking out the periphery so you can pay attention to what’s in front of you. There’s a matching ottoman to complete the look, as well as a version of the chair with a low integrated footrest made of tubular metal that lets you take a load off without wondering whether you should remove your shoes. $4,126, moroso.com

5. Vitra’s Alcove Sofa

The Alcove Sofa’s soft, high walls allow it to play impromptu meeting area, workspace or nap spot—it serves all three purposes exceptionally well. Plop down in one and you’re surrounded by the equivalent of sound-absorbing tile, which makes it ideal for contemplation, intimate conversation or recording the next episode of your YouTube series. Designers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec supply the sofa with firm, fitted pillows, rather than overstuffed ones, to give rigor to what will easily be the coziest and most coveted spot in a home or office. (The Love Seat model is shown here.) The Alcove aspires to be a serious workplace as well. A single-seater “Workstation” model has a contoured desk on one side that flips up to reveal a storage compartment with slots to run cables through. It’s the type of cubicle you’d want to trade your office for. $9,225, vitra.com

6. Offecct’s Small Room

As its name suggests, Ineke Hans’s series of short to long sofas provides the building blocks for creating a room within a room. The sofas have high backs and sides (roughly five-and-a-half-feet tall) and come in three complementary sizes—1, 1½ and 2 meters (about 3¼- to 6-feet long)—so they can be mixed and matched to fit various expanses. (The 1½-meter version is shown here.) Because each sofa has one enclosed side, they can be arranged in any combination (in a line, back to back, flipped front to back). The wide armrest can be outfitted with a writing surface or even a built-in flowerpot.$4,076,

Style Maker: Richard Branson

The daredevil mogul on why he breaks bread with his enemies and wants the necktie abolished

THERE ARE BUSINESS TRAVELERS—and there is Sir Richard Branson. The Virgin Group founder, known as much for his death-defying stunts in balloons and boats as for his ventures, spends much of his very busy life in transit. The entrepreneur zips between continents, projects and the extravagant sorts of leisure pursuits one would expect of the man who owns the grooviest airline in the skies.

Mr. Branson started building his global empire in the early 1970s with Virgin Records, known for launching bands like the Sex Pistols. Since selling the music company in 1992, his portfolio has expanded to include everything from wine to space travel. But he is probably best known for his airlines, which have been shaking up the industry since 1984, when a commercial flight he was on was canceled and he started selling seats on a plane he’d chartered to fellow passengers.

Mr. Branson has been criticized for his readiness to take the spotlight, but his personal style of branding has paid off handsomely. Lately, he has been investing his celebrity (and funds) in a variety of causes, among them saving endangered species and promoting peaceful conflict resolution through an organization called the Elders. We caught up with the British billionaire during a layover at New York’s JFK airport, where he recently launched a new Virgin Atlantic preflight clubhouse.

I keep copious notes. Notebooks have always been a critical part of my life. If I’m on a Virgin plane, I’ll get up and meet staff, meet passengers, get feedback and write things down.

When I’m on Necker Island [in the British Virgin Islands] about all I’ve got on is SPF—Sun Bum and also Island Company sun cream.

Every day is different, absolutely fascinating and a learning experience. In Canada, I’m trying to get legislation passed to save the polar bear. I’m going to Madagascar to try to save the lemur. Yesterday I was on stage with Amnesty International; today I’m doing a bit of business with Virgin Atlantic.

I hate being in hotels with a thousand rooms. And I personally don’t like going into hotels where you’ve got formal check-in desks. I’d much rather come and sit on the couch and be checked in that way, or ideally be checked in before I’ve actually gotten to the hotel.

My watch is a Bulova Accutron limited-edition. Every time one is sold, a portion of the proceeds goes to Virgin Unite, my charity.

I’ve spent a lifetime trying to set an example to get the necktie abolished. I mean, I just find it so sad going somewhere like Japan, where they’re all wearing suits. You look at these lovely pictures of them 100 years ago in their beautiful robes, and you think, ‘how on earth did the necktie ever catch on?’ I just find them uncomfortable and restricting. I think it’s people who run departments of companies, who’ve had to suffer all their lives and are damned if the next generation isn’t going to suffer, too.

I love to kiteboard. My board of choice is Cabrinha.

I’m not a very religious person, but if anybody was going to convert me, it would be Archbishop Tutu. He set an incredible example to the rest of the world, I think, when he helped bring about forgiveness in South Africa after the apartheid regime collapsed.

The reason I got into the travel business originally was out of frustration about the ghastly experience we used to get on other airlines. We literally started with one secondhand 747, crossing the Atlantic from London to New York to see whether people would go out of their way to travel on an airline that offered something a bit more personal. Fortunately, people did.

Jeans are great because you can wear the same pair of trousers 365 days a year and get away with it.

The movies that really make a difference are documentaries. ‘Sharkwater’ is one that changed my life. It’s about all the sharks that get slaughtered just for their fins and are thrown back in to die.

I could live off English roast dinner. If business is good, I love a glass of Champagne.

As a leader it’s important to always look for the best in other people—never criticize. If I ever said anything bad about anybody when I was a child, my mom would make me look in the mirror.

Saving money for better things – Tub scrub

My newest passion is using essential oils to clean my house.  I tried this new one on my tub today and I LOVED the smell:

• 1/2 cup baking soda
• 1 t. liquid soap
• 5 drops eucalyptus (can also use tea tree oil)

Add enough water to make a paste.  Use the scrub on your  tub and/or your sinks.

I love taking baths but hate cleaning the tub.  Eucalyptus is one of my favorite smells, and it actually made the chore enjoyable.  Very economical as well–

Quote of the Day

Tis easier to prevent bad habits than to break them.” —Benjamin Franklin