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Today’s Health Upgrade

• The slow diet

• Lost men and boys

• A challenge from Arnold

The Slow Diet

Do you often find yourself wolfing down your meals? Well, you may want to hit the brakes on your eating speed.

Research found that people who eat slowly consume significantly fewer calories.

Many studies have compared what happens when you eat slowly or quickly and have controlled for variables such as water intake. Repeatedly, researchers find that slower eaters eat fewer calories during the meal. Or, when they eat the same amount in a meal, there’s a domino effect, and longer meals tend to reduce the amount consumed in future meals.

In this study, when the participants ate slowly, they consumed nearly 100 fewer calories per meal. On top of that, they reported feeling more satisfied and less hungry after their slower meals. In fact, the slow eaters consumed an average of 25 percent fewer calories from snacks in later meals.

Research also suggests that eating slowly increases levels of two appetite-regulating hormones that are crucial in signaling fullness and satiety to the brain. So, slowing down our eating can not only help you eat less at each meal, but it could also help keep you fuller for longer, curb cravings, and prevent overeating later in the day.

Ketch’s Corner

You all know Arnold’s social media strategy — spread positivity, ignore the haters.

But our team sees everything. The mean tweets aren’t even close to being a majority, but I’ve noticed a common theme.

“No one cares.”

“You’re irrelevant.”

At first, this upset me. But then, taking Arnold’s lead, I decided not to let it get to me. It still confused me. They’re talking about someone who wrote a new book, Be Useful, that was the #1 NY Times bestseller this week; someone who dominated this summer’s Netflix charts with both an original show and a documentary; someone who can publish videos about current events that generate hundreds of millions of views and billions of impressions.

They’re talking about someone who can enter the daily newsletter world in January and have an inspired village of 600,000 readers by October.

So, I did what Arnold recommends in his book: I turned my confusion into curiosity. I started to look into these accounts. And I found some similarities.

A huge majority of them were men. And their social media feeds were walls of rage. After talking about Richard Reeves’ book, I thought about what we wrote about lost men and boys.

We committed to reaching out to them in this newsletter. So, I kept digging. Besides seeing lots of angry replies to different public figures (we will talk about this in a future column, but think about how powerless it must make you feel spending your day around people like Arnold who openly say they don’t read your negativity), retweets and reposts of quite a few of the same “manfluencers” and outrage-stirring social media stars were popping up.

I knew I was in a pretty nasty hole, but I kept digging. And I found something across all of those accounts — almost daily, they tell their followers not to trust “mainstream,” “establishment,” or “elite” sources.

I thought about George Orwell’s 1984: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Cults succeed by isolating their members from outside voices. And I realized these angry, embittered internet voices use the same strategy.

Let’s be clear about something: Everybody gets things wrong from time to time. Nobody will ever be perfect. Information and knowledge change and evolve every day and every minute in the social media era.

But anybody who tells you not to trust anyone else is waving a gigantic red flag.

I dug my way back out of the hole with more understanding for the angry Arnold replies. They aren’t dumb or bad people; they’re in a bubble where they really believe he is irrelevant, even as anyone in the real world sees win after win this year.

I could spend time complaining about that, but my boss is someone who says if you find something you want to complain about, just do something about it.

So, I am marshaling the resources of the Pump Club to start a concerted effort to help pull these men (and the few women) out of their bubbles. We reached out to a few friends with strong voices who should be able to reach these lost men and boys. Once a week, we’ll have a rotating column from one of us about our thoughts on masculinity because we can’t keep letting these angry and whiny voices flood the zone and expect to win the hearts and minds of the men and boys they attract.

We are starting with this roster:

Me (Ketch): a new dad just as likely to pull a deadlift PR while listening to the Frozen soundtrack as the Undertaker’s theme.

Adam: he trains in what looks like a literal dungeon with chains, has two young boys, and is the author of You Can’t Screw This Up.

Michael Easter: the author of The Comfort Crisis and Scarcity Brain, who can ruck farther than anyone and get dropped off in the Alaskan wilderness for weeks to hunt an elk and survive.

Brad Stulberg: the author of The Practice of Groundedness and Master of Change, can also deadlift enough for three men.

And, of course, we have Arnold, who said at one point on this book tour, “I never felt that I needed to show anyone I was manly,” in response to a question about performative masculinity.

We hope to continue adding to our roster and providing new voices to the masculinity debate. We won't let the idea that to be a man is to be simultaneously a victim and a bully win.

For the women of our village, know that we aren’t trying to turn this into a manfluencer newsletter. This will be a once-a-week column, and we hope you want to forward it to your sons, brothers, and friends who might need it.

It isn’t just the lost men and boys — the world needs this right now.

Arnold’s Challenge

This week, I talked about how social media is anti-social, leading people to act in a negative, angry way they’d never act in the real world.

Daniel touched on some of this in his column today.

Normally, this is your weekend challenge. This time, I’m thinking bigger. This challenge is for 30 days.

I don’t want you to post anything negative on the internet. For 30 days.

If you’re thinking, “Oh my god, Schnitzel, that’s impossible! How can I do that?” you’re proving my point. You need this challenge.

As you go through the next month, you’ll have many opportunities to get angry, mean, and negative. I want you to pause, not take the opportunity, and before you move on, think about how it made you feel not to respond.

Many people don’t realize that we always think a snappy comeback or an angry comment will make us feel better, but it never does.

Think back to all the times you used the opportunity to go negative — did it feel like a weight was lifted off your back? Did you smile? No!

Anger breeds more anger. Negativity plants more negative seeds.

For the next month, we aren’t going to feed the anti-social machine. You don’t need to quit social media or anything crazy like that. You just aren’t allowed to be negative.

Take out an index card or a piece of paper right now. Write “Days with No Negativity Online” across the top. When you get to the end of today, make a tally mark. I expect 30 marks.

I also expect you’ll feel like a weight was lifted, and you’ll smile a little more over the next 30 days. Let’s go!

As we close out another week, I want to thank all of you for being a part of this village. I’m overwhelmed by your feedback, how you share these posts and positivity on social media, and your support of this daily newsletter. Here’s wishing you all a fantastic weekend!

-Arnold, Adam, and Daniel

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Publisher: Arnold Schwarzenegger​

Editors-in-chief: Adam Bornstein and Daniel Ketchell