The Genius Diet: 30+ Science-Based Tips For A Better Body Through Greater Creativity, Alertness, and Productivity

A guide to a better body through a better mind (*Draft Version 0.5*)

Primer: General Philosophy of the Genius Diet and A Few Non-Intuitive Tips

Many of the best practices in improving productivity, creativity, and alertness are also scientifically proven to help people become more physically fit.

The reason busy professionals are so prone to weight gain is that the brain can signal us to consume hundreds of more calories during bouts of complex problem solving. Fortunately, sugary snacks happen to be just one way to feed the brain; nutrient-dense foods, quick exercise and mindfulness also quench the brain’s cravings in equally or even more efficient ways.

That is, calm focus is a fantastic shield against overeating, compared to a mind that starved, stressed, or sleep deprived. The very things that make us better and happier at our jobs are also great ways to become physically fit.

Some tips from peer-reviewed studies to combat overeating include:

• In one study, participants solving complex problems snacked less if they were asked to do a brief bit of exercise, because movement can be as effective as eating to getting nutrients to the brain (in this case, a nutrient called Lactate).
• In another study, participants who took a mild walk outside were satiated with less chocolate than those who remained sedentary.
• Getting at least 20 minutes of blue-sky sunlight in the morning (with no glasses or contacts) and blocking that same blue spectrum of light before bed increases sleep quality and reduces stress by helping the brain better regulate Melatonin production (most electronics give off blue spectrum).
• Early morning meals with higher protein and fat content both improve cognitive functioning and lead to less calorie consumption; the body can be trained to feed more off fat than carbohydrates after extended periods of a more balanced diet.

Overview Of Tips

This particular post is an à la carte buffet of science-tested techniques for improving physical fitness and intelligence at the same time.

I decided to start collecting these peer-reviewed techniques after a decade of roller-coaster dieting, since my waistline would inevitably expand when I had to prioritize work over my personal health. I eventually incorporated enough techniques so that being physically fit was an essential part of my productivity habits*.

The strategies are sub-divided in three main sections

• Food and Nutrition
• Physical Exercise
• Daily Habits (meditation, sleep, etc)

Each tip is stand-alone. Basic elements of the Genius Diet are at the top of each section and fill down with more advanced (and experimental) strategies.

For a table contents, with links to a quick start guide, a rapid weight-loss version, and more, click here

Section I: Food and Nutrition

What’s the best food for optimal cognition?

It’s easier to think about what foods should be avoided, either because they cause a nasty blood sugar crash or because they’re known to cause adverse cognitive effects.

Unfortunately, harmful foods happen to be exceedingly common in the standard american diet:

1. White carbs (flour, rice, popcorn, potatoes), gluten-free grain substitutes, and processed grains (e.g. corn flakes, puffed rice)
2. Sweeteners (all types of sugar, syrups, fruit juices, processed honey, agave, and aspartame)
3. Blended or juiced foods
4. Fish high in mercury

Research suggests that high-fat, low-carb diets increase cognitive speed processing and complex carbs like Oatmeal provide sustained attention into the late morning better than a low-fiber, high carb cereal.

What’s the best breakfast for optimal cognition?

A wonderful review of all the research from Tufts university suggests that the best breakfast is an equal balance of carbs, fat and protein. Fat and protein smooth out the impact of carbs to the brain.

A few studies do show that that high-carb meals, like juice or fruit-loops, have a positive effect on cognition, especially memory. This is why people aren’t crazy to crave sweet breakfasts. Ice cream — no joke — is known to improve scores on tests of cognitive performance.

However, sugar acts like a drug: there’s a short-term boost to the brain, but the longer-term consequences of a blood sugar crash have nasty consequences later in the day. Prolonged unhealthy diets can lead to inflammation and weight gain that create a downward spiral of stress, obesity and lack of cognition.

That is, sustained attention requires slow-burning energy stores.

This is why number of studies show that natural sugars or complex carbs, such as oatmeal, sustain the cognitive boost for a few more hours during the day compared to processed sugars.

My favorite breakfasts:

• Raw honey and full-fat greek yogurt
• A microwaved sweet potato dripping with lots of grass-fed butter

What’s the best lunch for optimal cognition?

The best lunch may be a small lunch or no lunch at all. Research consistently shows that eating during the afternoon is a principle cause of afternoon fatigue.

My personal trick is to exercise instead of eating lunch and then to snack after. With exercise, my scores on a cognitive tests are boosted about 11% after exercise, compared to 9% lower scores if I eat lunch.

If and when I do eat lunch, I typically eat a higher fat meal; research suggests higher fat lunches dampen the inevitable impairment of cognition in the afternoon.

My favorite lunch recipes:

• A olive oil-heavy chopped salad
• A big handful of nuts

What’s the best dinner for optimal cognition?

Even if you’re a crazy workaholic that burns the midnight oil, the most important function of the evening meal may be preparation for sleep.

The evidence is mixed on how evening meals impact the quality of sleep, the general consensus seems to be that many people benefit from eating their smallest meals at night and young, active people benefit from a small dense caloric snack before bed, especially if they exercise at night.

Bananas, sweet potatoes or milk might be the perfect carby snack, as potassium is known to increase sleep quality.

Avoid mountains of Sriracha, as spicy foods impair quality sleep. Medium-glycemic foods, such as rice, may shorten the time it takes to fall asleep.

What do shakes or juices do to cognition?

From a nutritional perspective, juices and shakes contain a similar number of grams of sugar as candy.

University of California San Francisco Fructose doctor Rob Lustig describes the sugar of fruits, Fructose, as toxic. “Calorie for calorie, fruit juice is worse for you than fizzy drinks’’, he told the BBC.

Lustig’s video (below) has been seen over +6M times on Youtube:

Pulverizing and shredding destroys the intricate fiber shield that nature wraps around sugars. This is why whole foods in their natural state are often healthier. In studies, those who ate whole apples ended up eating fewer calories than those who ate applesauce or apple juice.

If you crave juice and shakes, your body may simply be hankering for carbs. A sweet potato or some raw honey may be a better way to quench that craving.

What are the best sweets?

Raw Honey is a pretty fantastic sweetener. Even though it’s almost entirely pure sugar, research suggests that it does not spike blood sugar in the same way that other pure sweeteners do and may be even safe for diabetics. indeed, there are ancient tribes, like the Hadza’s in Africa, that continue to get a significant portion of the calories from nothing but pure honey.

Dates, another long time staple of human civilization, also does not appear to increase body fat or blood sugar.

I should note that the research on these sweeteners are in their natural form. Honey is especially sensitive to cooking and loses many of its nutritional properties when processed. Fascinating enough, the ancient indian medical texts of the Ayurveda warned against the dangers of heating honey.

Zero-calorie sugar substitutes such Stevia may actually lower insulin, so they are also a promising sweetener alternative. While Stevia is delightfully sweet, no calorie sweeteners don’t contain any carbs, so you might just be tricking your body into thinking it’s getting brain fuel.

What should I do if I need caffeine?

Caffeine is a crutch. Healthy minds do not need a drug that artificially stints blood flow to have focus throughout the day. In my experience, caffeine is also misleading: it gives me energy, but I’m not as creative or calm as if I get a good night’s sleep.

One research review of caffeine found that the drug certainly helps people focus and improve their reaction time, but it may hinder more complex tasks that heavily rely on working memory. Maria Konnikova over at the The New Yorker contended that caffeine might interfere with creativity, because occasional mind wandering is known to produce novel thoughts.

I also think there are more effective substitutes. I replaced caffeine with 30-seconds of exercise intense exercise, which improved my scores on cognitive tests more than caffeine.

Moreover, caffeine can become addictive, requiring ever higher doses to achieve similar effects.

That said, a crutch can be useful while you work through an injured mind, caused by a night of poor sleep, a stressful period or some other chronic condition.

If you must dose caffeine, Green Tea might be much better, as it had a fraction of the caffeine of coffee, plus a naturally occurring compound, L-theanine, that induces a state of calm along with alertness.

I crave unhealthy foods. How can I change that?

One technique that I have found helpful is to teach my body to crave healthy foods.

“Unhealthy” foods still contain valuable macronutrients (fat, carbs, and protein), vitamins and minerals. French fries have almost as much potassium as a banana (a helpful nutrient associated with bone density).

Your brain only knows how to associate cravings with foods it has previously consumed, so the primary trick that researchers have used to get children to like vegetables is to have them taste foods occasionally over a period of several weeks.

A primary hack of the Genius Diet is to eat the constituent components of your favorite foods and see if you still crave them. For instance, I’ll eat plain salt, a baked potato, or oil-cooked eggs to see if I still want french fried afterwards.

If one of them satisfies my cravings, I then dig deeper into why I crave that particular food. In my case, eating salt quenched my appetite for foods like french fries and peanut butter. Salt is a leading indicator of stress, so I began to increase my meditation practice. In one week last August, I lost 2lbs by just meditating a lot more every day.

If you’ve had an unhealthy diet for a long time, you might need to spend at least a few weeks with a broadly healthier diet. I’m a big fan of Mark Sisson’s Primal Blueprint, Mark Hyman’s Ultramind or Tim Ferriss’s 4-Hour Body.

Section II: Exercise

What’s the best exercise for a better cognition?

Sports or some creative activity that brings you joy. Recent research finds that participants who engage in spatially complex tasks, such as tree climbing or walking on a balance beam, improve on tests of cognition.

As I explain more in the chapter on the evolutionary origins of a brain-based diet, advanced motor skills and higher-order problem solving skills probably co-evolved at the same time in early man. The Gluteus Maximus, Torso, and Shoulders are have uniquely human functions for endurance hunting.

There’s a big difference in the kind of body we sculpt from activities involving raw strength (like power lifting) and those that require complex problem solving kills.

Contrary to the stereotype of the the numbskull athlete, elite soccer players are identified by above average cognitive abilities. And, it’s no coincidence that sweat-drenched activities like soccer are also associated the sexiest men alive.

Dancing, soccer, rock climbing, or basketball push our mind as well as our body. It’s important to find something you enjoy doing, since it’ll be something that be a relief to during times of stress, rather than resorting to snacking or TV.

Do I need to join a gym and, if so, what’s the best muscle-building routine?

In the Genius Diet, muscle-specific training is only important to help you enjoy the activities you love even more. If jumping higher or sprinting faster helps you look forward to participating in an activity, that seems like a good excuse to add conditioning.

Here’s a few of my favorite conditioning exercises that take no longer than 12 minutes, 2–3 days/week.

1. The New York Times has a fantastic advanced 7-minute conditioning workout (yes, 7 minutes is scientifically tested to be effective).
2. Six bouts of 30 seconds all-out sprints — The world-class footballer and runner, Willie Gault, once told me that a handful of all-out sprints, with 90 seconds of rest in between, was his top exercise. Don’t underestimate short sprints. It is no coincidence that sprinters look like they could double as underwear models (even though the world’s fastset human, Usain Bolt, has reportedly never run more than a mile)
3. 7-minutes of Burpees (a pushup to a jumping jack). 7 straight minutes is one of the most crushing workouts I’ve ever done im my old Cross Gym. For the greatest effect, remember to hit chrest to the floor, pop up in a full squat (butt near the floor) and jump as high as possible. Between arm, glut and leg strength, this is an excellent conditioning exercise for many activities.

I spend an equal of amount of time stretching and mobility as I do on general conditioning. Especially as we age, injury prevention is crucial ensuring that we can continue to active and mobile. Kelly Starrett is my go-to expert on injury prevention over at MobilityWOD (Disclosure: he is one of my personal trainers).

I’m not a big fan of gyms and think bodyweight exercises are more than sufficient for most people. The only reason I need to go to the gym is to improve my heavy squat, which is arguably one of the most athletically beneficial exercises, because there’s very few activities that don’t benefit from stronger, faster legs. Body weight squats don’t hold a candle to Olympic weightlifting, which are shown to be to be significantly more effective at improving vertical leap than plyometrics alone.

But, for the most part, some at-home bodyweight work is often more than sufficient.

How long do I need to exercise for and how many days per week?

Significant muscle building and cardiovascular improvements can occur in bouts of exercise of roughly 7 minutes long, two-to-three days a week.

What if I can’t find a sport/social activity?

Dancing or “exergaming” are both pretty wonderful option for folks who don’t have time for a social recreational activity. They can easily be done in the privacy of your own home; whether you’re just rocking out to some music or want move along to a gaming system like the Xbox.

Dancing is one of the oldest ones of exercise and has a number of cognitive benefits; In a randomized control study, participants given vouchers to tango classes reduced self-reported stress levels.

Similarly, children given dancing video game equipment lost weight, increased self-confidence and showed improvements in complex cognitive tasks, such as the ability determine the meaning of made-up words by how they are used in sentences (a known measure of deduction skills).

Here’s an example of a tech startup worker, Michal Habdank-Kolaczkowski, who began using Nintendo Wii Zumba in the morning with this wife:

The everyday stress of living and working in the city makes it hard to find the time, let alone the energy, to prioritize and incorporate fitness it our everyday routine. Combine that with a healthy case of introversion and we can pretty much rule out any type of group-fitness class or after-work assembly.

My wife and I found a solution that suits us best: an hour of Zumba Fitness, the latin-influenced sport of organized dancing; played on an old Nintendo Wii, at 7am, in the seclusion of our home.

Let me put this another way.

My wife and I start every day by dancing, laughing, and sweating together. Who gets to say that?!

It prepares us physically, mentally, and emotionally for the day. It brings us closer together. It keeps us in shape. Most importantly, it fits nicely into our personal and professional lives: no gyms; no instructors; just exercise and a tolerance of 630am wakeup times and Enrique Iglesias’ hits from the turn of the millennium.

Why does high intensity matter? Can’t i just jog on a treadmill?

The human body is an extremely efficient machine and seems to only adapt when stressed to its limits. This is why a number of studies find that a few 30 seconds sprints do more to improve the mind and burn fat than a much longer light jog

One study found that participants who performed 10 bouts of 1 minute high intensity cycling (where it’s difficult to continue at the same pace for longer than a minute without rest) do better on distracted reaction time tests than those who enjoyed a light stretching exercise. Specifically, it is hypothesized that high intensity interval training activates the prefrontal dorsal cortex, a relatively newly evolved portion of the the brain involved in working memory capacity.

A similar study found that strength training was as effective as intense aerobic exercise, suggesting that it is the act of exhausting the body to failure that produces cognitive benefits.

Personally, I mix up cardio and strength training; the research suggests both will leave me feeling fit for work.

Section III: Mindfulness

Is meditation worth it and how do I get started?

There’s a very good reason why some of the most successful technology CEOs in the world, including Google’s Sergey Brin, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, and Salesforce’s Marc Benioff all meditate: stress if a productivity killer. The payoffs of mindfulness are so great that Salesforce is reportedly putting a meditation room on every single floor of it’s new San Francisco.

Meditation doesn’t have to be a 3-hour seclusion in the woods.

“Twenty minutes of sitting (or sometimes walking) per day is enough to stay relatively grounded amid everyday anxieties,” writes Ev Williams, the co-founder of Twitter and Medium.

But, it’s important to note that effective meditation is not intuitive; it’s a learned skill. I’m a fan of these educational technologies:

• The Spire, an app designed with Stanford-led research that takes users through systematic breathing exercises. There’s also an optional waistband hardware accessory that measures the quality of breathing.
• The Muse, a brainwave sensing headband that can detect electrical patterns associated with calm and focus. I originally got my start with meditation through this kind of computer-guided technology. It was helpful in teaching me the difference between effortful concentration and true relaxed focus.

A more advanced form of mindfulness, practiced by the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, is known as Transcendental Meditation, which uses repeated mantras to induce a state of light dreaming.

I practice almost everyday and it’s replaced my afternoon naps. My teacher was Emily Fletcher, who has an online practice, Ziva Meditation, which I thought was a wonderful introduction.

For those who want to just try TM out a few times, Tim Ferriss, has a solid beginners tutorial in his book, Tools of Titans.

How is it possible to walk 18 miles a day and still be productive? It’s all about the smart phone

One of the best things I ever did for my productivity and general health was migrate to mobile computing. I now perform about 90% of all my computing on a phone. I can now walk up to 18 miles a day without losing a minute of productivity.

Mobile computing takes about a week or two to settle into, but ultimately I’m more productive as a result.

Isn’t walking while working distracting?

Actually, it’s the opposite. Being stationary paralyzes the mind; the brain needs a strong supply of fresh nutrients, which is why many people pace to think through difficult problems.

Research shows that doctors using a walking treadmill desk were 10% more accurate in diagnosing patients than those sitting.

Movement is the natural state for thinking in humans.

What’s the best way move to mobile–only computing?

Here’s a list of apps and strategies

• Download an email application based on left and right thumb-swiping for message archiving. As an avid Gmail user, I use Google’s Inbox app. Outlook is also good app and works with many different email providers. The cutting edge of email efficiency applications are based on a user interface design that permits rapid archive and snoozing. I believe it’s (far) more efficient than desktop emailing.
• Use voice dictation. Both iOs and Android have advanced voice-to-text translation software. It’s much faster than thumb typing. Voice-to-text is not perfect yet. Sometimes, I’ll compose the basic text of a long email or news story while speaking and then polish it on a desktop.
• Use proper posture while walking. You could avoid the dreaded “text neck “ by walking upright with rolled-back shoulders. Kelly Starrett, my personal PT and prominent health coach, has an excellent video demonstration.

There are still some activities that I can’t do on a mobile phone (I use statistical software, for instance, that isn’t available on a phone). There are also some websites that just don’t function well on phones. But, the ability to be 100% productive anywhere, especially in transit, more than makes up for the time it takes to learn mobile-online computing. And, your mind will thank you.

Feedback

This post will be updated throughout the year and is an on-going project. Please leave feedback in the comments or email me at greg at greg ferenstein dot com.

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