Brain Over Brawn: Smart Solutions to Regain and Maintain Strength, Health & Youth

Brain Over Brawn is an succinct instruction manual for the care, feeding, and maintenance of men and women, and deals in equal measure with the methods for proper upkeep and the reasoning and science behind those techniques.

This is a book for humans. If you are human, this is for you. If you are a dog or cat, bear or otter, reptile or other homo sapienally-challenged being, stop reading immediately. Besides, you already know what’s in this book. The more subtle distinction of man or woman, child or elderly, motivated or lazy, bored or busy, over- or under-educated, artist or executive, does not alter the relevance of what you re about to read: If you are a human, this information will apply.

In a way, this book was designed to perform the opposite function of a traditional book (a bizarro-book, if you will); its goal is to help you reduce the already bloated amounts of information fed to you by the diet, nutrition, and exercise industries much of which is outdated, inaccurate, misleading or incomplete. We as a species are rapidly becoming as obese and inundated with data as our bodies are with food. Your best defense is knowledge, so you may quickly discern useful information from marketing gimmicks, outright scams, or otherwise legitimate programs that range anywhere from inefficient to downright dangerous. And that is the goal of this book: to teach you to fish, rather than sell you an auto-renewing fish subscription or the latest in fishing pole technology, as it were.

Humans are obsessed with health. Or in fact, perhaps it is more accurate (and revealing) to state that people are obsessed with illness, with disease, with repelling the inevitable germ and viral armies of sickness that persistently assault and invade our bodies. Yet the CDC reports that of the 225 million adults (age 20+) in the United States, 141 million (roughly 67%) of them are overweight or obese (and contrary to what singer Meatloaf’s ballad would have you believe, 2 out of 3 is bad)) And while 50 million of those Americans each year will resolutely start a diet (or diets), perhaps 5% (1 in 20) will succeed in achieving any substantial or lasting change. Recently, ‘fat acceptance’ proponents have even begun to condemn advocation of fitness standards as obsession with vanity and appearance, but this objection is far outweighed by the risks to health, mobility, length, and quality of life. The FDA also estimates the diet and weight loss industries are expanding faster than waistlines at a hefty $30 billion for 2008, which therefore begs the question: with all this money being spent, why are we only getting fatter?