Drop Dead Healthy
Ratings12
Average rating3.9
15
Ratings12
Average rating3.9
"Having sanctified himself in The Year of Living Biblically and sharpened his mind in The Know-It-All, A.J. Jacobs had one feat left in the self-improvement trinity: to become the healthiest man in the world. He didn't want just to lose weight, or finish a triathlon, or lower his cholesterol. His ambitions were far, far greater: Maximal health from head to toe. The task was massive. He had to tackle a complicated web of diet and exercise advice, much of which was nonsensical, unproven, and contradictory. He had to consult a team of medical advisers. And he had to subject himself to a grueling regimen of exercises, a range of diets, and an array of practices to improve everything from his hearing to his sleep to his sex life all the while testing the patience of his long-suffering wife. He left nothing untested, from the caveman workout to veganism, from the treadmill desk to extreme chewing. Drop Dead Healthy teems with hilarity and warmth and pushes our cultures assumptions about and obsessions with what makes good health, allowing the reader to reflect on his or her own health, body, and eventual mortality"--
Reviews with the most likes.
Jacobs spends a year or so trying out a bunch of different health fads as a means of becoming the “healthiest man alive.” He's a funny/talented writer, so I enjoyed his somewhat sardonic (but never mean) retelling of meeting with the experts and gurus of each fad and actually diving into their merit scientifically. That being said, the whole book is ridden with diet culture, and made me think, what's the point here? Jacobs more or less comes to a similar conclusion – that all of this stuff is time-sucking and can be contradictory and like his aunt, death is coming for us all anyways, and not always in ripe old age, often regardless of how we live. There are some “healthy” things we can do to improve our lives slightly, but the key is the word “slightly,” and a quest for bodily perfection is a doomed one.
I like to rate books the way I rate food; books and food can be (1) delicious and (2) nutritious. Some books, like chick lit and mysteries, are mostly just delicious. Some books, like history books, are mostly just nutritious.
A. J. Jacobs' books are a little of both. Yummy and good-for-you.
Especially this book. Drop Dead Healthy, like all of Jacobs' books, is the story of Jacobs attempting to challenge himself to do something very difficult. This time Jacobs takes on the challenge of becoming very healthy. Very, very healthy. And, like all of his books, Jacobs loves to push himself to extremes. (Who can forget the chapter in Year of Living Biblically when Jacobs tells how he went to the park in NYC and began to follow the Biblical edict to stone adulterers?)
Jacobs, in his quest to become very, very healthy, attempts to eat right, exercise properly, experience quiet, lower his stress, de-toxify his home, breathe better, have a perfect night's sleep, stand up straight, see better....Whew! It is exhausting to just read the list of all the things he attempts to do in order to try to be the world's healthiest person.
Yes, exhausting but also hilarious. Jacobs doesn't do anything halfway. He is torn, at one point in the book, between trying to decide whether to wear earphones (to mute the noise of city life) or a helmet (to protect his skull). (His poor wife. I always think about his poor wife when I read his books. Did she have any idea what she was in for when she married him?!)
You can't help but take in a little of the knowledge about good health that Jacobs shares in bits and pieces all through the book.
