This is a guest post from Matt Gartland over at HealthyLifestyleDesign.com

What do Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Biz Stone, Mark Zuckerberg, and Matt Mullenweg all have in common?

They’re all geeks – wildly successful and accomplished geeks!

Geeks are creative problem solvers. They perceive and interact with the world differently. They have seemingly divine abilities to conjure remarkable solutions that improve the lives and capture the imaginations of millions. This power is born from challenging conventional wisdom, exploring the boundaries of what’s possible, and taking risks.

And they’re changing the world – from communications, to philanthropy, to publication, to activism, to education, and beyond.

What does this have to do with designing a healthy lifestyle?

Everything!

First, you can learn from their examples and apply their creative philosophies to designing a fulfilling and healthy life.  Second, you can (and should) use the clever creations of the geek-community to empower your healthy lifestyle. Remember, geeks are creative problem solvers. And simplifying the process of getting healthy in a fun and practical way can be tricky.

So, here are five geeky wonders to conquer your heath:

1. DailyBurn – Your One-Stop, Personal Health Headquarters

DailyBurn will mesmerize you at first use. This web-based application has a ridiculously simple and almost game-like user interface. You’ll get hooked. Trust me.

Why give DailyBurn a go?

• Because you have access to over 244,000 foods and recipes
• Because you can track what you eat with a few, simple clicks
• Because you can record your workout data in minutes
• Because you can compete in fun, health challenges with your friends on DailyBurn
• Because you get motivation and support from the entire DailyBurn community
• Because you can easily track your progress with idiot-proof and insightful analytics
• Because it’s FREE

But wait, DailyBurn doesn’t stop there.

They also have a revolutionary mobile application for the iPhone – FoodScanner. It allows you to retrieve the nutritional data of any food item with a UPC barcode. You can enter how many servings you ate of that food after a scan, which automatically updates your food journal in DailyBurn.

It’s dead-easy to use. Watch for yourself.

FoodScanner Demo

2. SparkPeople.com – America’s #1 Weight Loss and Fitness Website

SparkPeople is a jaw-dropper. It’s bursting with information and tools on all aspects of a healthy lifestyle. Whatever your healthy lifestyle passions and goals, you can learn more and find like-minded friends at SparkPeople.

They aim to “make healthy living fun & easy with our tools, content & community.” This fits perfectly with their mission “to help millions of people live healthier lives and reach their goals”.

Why should you fancy SparkPeople?

• Because over 7 million people believe in SparkPeople and have joined the movement
• Because they offer personalized diet and fitness plans
• Because they provide calorie calculators, fitness trackers, and instructional videos
• Because you can connect with certified dietitians and fitness trainers
• Because the supportive community will help you on your quest to greater health
• Because it’s FREE

3. Twitter & Facebook – Life 2.0

What else could possibly be said about Twitter and Facebook? Not much. If you don’t know about these two social network juggernauts I’d check your pulse to see if you’re alive.

But emphasizing Twitter’s and Facebook’s contributions to radically evolving the pursuit of a healthy lifestyle cannot be overstated.

At no point in human history has it been easier to build, connect, and grow communities of supportive and compassionate friends – thanks largely to Twitter and Facebook. Such social relationships are vital to consistent healthy living. Why? Because of the motivation, inspiration, and sense of belonging they provide.

But there’s more.

Twitter and Facebook grant unprecedented access to premier healthy lifestyle experts. You can “friend” and follow renowned nutritionists, acclaimed trainers, brilliant doctors, distinguished healthy publicists, professional athletes, etc. Their wisdom is at your fingertips.

This isn’t about sharing what you ate for lunch. It’s about learning what you should eat for lunch. And so much more.

So get social and join the Healthy Lifestyle Design Tribe on Twitter and Facebook! And if you haven’t already, enlist in the NerdFitness Rebellion on Twitter and Facebook too!

4. FitBit – The Intergalactic Pedometer from the Future

Are you familiar with pedometers? That’s right. Those goofy things you attach to your belt to track your steps.

FitBit is a pedometer, on steroids and from the future.

The FitBit device automatically collects your fitness and sleep data. Specifically, it accurately tracks calories burned, distance traveled, and hours of quality sleep. Seriously, it monitors your sleep – time you went to bed, time to fall asleep, times awakened, actual sleep time.

How can it do all that? According to FitBit, it “contains a 3D motion sensor like the one found in the Nintendo Wii.”

You guessed it, there’s more.

The FitBit device easily syncs with FitBit.com, providing you the ability to track and analyze your daily activity data. Merely walk within 15 feet of the provided docking station and your data will be automatically uploaded.

Oh, and FitBit tracks your steps too.

5. HealthCentral.com – Your All-Knowing Personal Physician at Your Call 24/7

HealthCentral is akin to having unfettered access to a prestigious medical library. It offers intuitive information on copious health conditions, diseases, symptoms, and more. While it has parallels with WebMD, I enjoy HealthCentral for it’s simplicity and quick answers.

What else is special about HealthCentral?

• You can perform a self-examination of various symptoms
• You can watch videos of medical experts
• You can find a therapist in your area
• Everything is FREE

Disclosure - I had the privilege of meeting HealthCentral’s CEO Chris Schroeder at a 2009 conference on how social technologies are changing the future of healthcare and healthy living. Chris was the keynote – a brilliant and impassioned person with a genuine vision for helping others via social technology innovation.

Bonus: Withings – The OMG Scale of Your Dreams

Scales are boring.

Not this one.

The Withings scale revolutionizes the whole idea behind weighing yourself. With old school scales you hoop on, grimace at your weight, hoop off, done. Weighing yourself was an episodic event with no tangible output or call-to-action. And it definitely wasn’t fun.

With the Withings scale, those days are gone. Welcome to new school.

The Withings scale captures not only your weight but also calculates your lean mass, fat mass, and body-mass-index (BMI). It then transmits that data to the Internet via an encrypted WiFi signal where it is accessible via the Withings.com system.

Once online at Withings.com, you can monitor the historical progress of your body composition measurements. According to Withings…

“The web dashboard offers a rich graphical interface with easy browsing over time and allows you to zoom in on the date ranges of your choice. You therefore take pleasure in observing the evolution of your fitness in a simple, intuitive environment.”

It can also integrate with your DailyBurn account or others like Google Health.

They also offer an iPhone application so that you can access your data while mobile.

***

These geeky wonders are just the tip of the iceberg. Many more abound on the Internets. Feel free to look around.

But don’t overwhelm yourself. These technologies (or any other) should make your healthy life easier, not harder. Forcing yourself to adopt anything doesn’t work. So don’t do it.

And when in doubt, do as the geeks – challenge conventional wisdoms and use/create remarkable solutions to transform your life.

Now go forth and geek-out your healthy lifestyle!

What other geeky creations do you use to manage your healthy lifestyle?

What healthy lifestyle challenges are you encountering that warrant a new geeky gadget?

###

Matt Gartland is a healthy lifestyle geek extraordinaire, blogger, world traveler, lifestyle entrepreneur, coffee fanatic, web techie, lifelong kid, bookworm, and more. He writes at Healthy Lifestyle Design (HLD), where he unleashes his passion for remarkable and unconventional living propelled by amazing health. Follow Matt on Twitter and join the HLD Tribe on Facebook.

(Photo: pragmagraphr)

Only two more days until the launch my free e-book, A Newbie’s Guide to Fitness!  On with with today’s article:

Yesterday, while riding back from Nashville, I started reading Born to Run, a book I had borrowed from my friend Chappy (who reviewed the book for Nerd Fitness here).  I didn’t actually plan on writing about the book because last week’s review.  Welp, things change.

I read the book for the entire four-hour car ride, then plopped down on my couch for another three hours and finished it entirely.  I don’t like running at all, but after finishing this book I can’t wait to strap on my Vibram Five-Fingers and give it another shot.  If you have ever gone running before or plan on running again, you owe it to yourself to pick up a copy.  It’s a fantastic read that has already inspired me to push myself to become a better person physically, mentally, and spiritually.  I realize that sounds like a lot of hippy new-age crap (no offense to hippies), but I’m serious!  Born to Run manages to be a thrilling and highly educational page-turner, mixing equal parts autobiography, science, myth, legend, and mystery.  I literally could not stop reading it once I started.

Born to Run has motivated me to give running another try, with a much different attitude.  I actually ran a year of Cross Country in high school before realizing that I hated running.  Weekly shin splints compounded an even greater problem: my heart wasn’t in it.  Since then, I’ve forced myself to run like a hamster on a treadmill for miles and miles because I thought that was what I supposed to do.  I hated running, and running didn’t like me.

However, I’m now at the point where putting on some funky shoes and hauling ass through a park sounds like a great time.  I can’t wait to put on my iPod, pick a direction, and just start running.  No watch to track my progress, no pre-defined route to run over and over again: I want to run in a direction I’ve never been, on a trail I’ve never seen, and just see what’s out there.  I think the greatest lesson I took away from book is that you can only be successful in running if you have a great attitude.  If you consider it a means to an end, you are going to fail miserably.  For the ultra-marathoners of this book, running IS the end.  These aren’t people who have trained their whole lives to run either: most of them didn’t recognize their gift until often halfway through life when some major event got them running and they just never stopped.  Born to Run is so thought-provoking and inspiring that it has me wondering what my true potential is.  Could I ever do something like a triathlon, marathon, Ultra-man competition, or 100 mile death-race through the Copper Canyons?  The mere thought of putting myself through such “torture” had NEVER entered my mind until yesterday.  Now that I know what the human body is capable of, I’m not going to rule anything out.

For those of who you don’t like running but force yourself to do it because you think you’re supposed to, read this book.  If you have ever been injured because of running, read this book.  If you like running and haven’t been hurt yet, read this book.  If you don’t like running but you love a great story, read this book.  For those of you who are on the fence, read this article, and then read this book.

-Steve

A few weeks back, I was turned onto the book Born to Run by a Nerd Fitness reader (thanks again Evan), so I immediately told my friend Matt (nickname: Chappy), an avid runner, about the book.  Before I had a chance to go to the store to buy a copy, Chappy had already bought one and read it.  I asked him to write a review of the book for the Nerd Fitness community, and he gladly obliged.  Take it away Chappy:

Have you ever gotten out of bed, slipped on your running shoes, and thought, “This is something I was built to do?”  To be quite honest, I most certainly do not.  Preparing for a jog these days seems more akin to suiting up for a battle against our own inclinations; high tech footwear to protect your feet and joints from their structural inadequacies, moisture wicking apparel to fend of our your sweat, and a seven function timepiece so you know the specific extents of your self-inflicted torture. This seems a far cry from any evolutionary calling.  However, once you read Christopher McDougall’s “Born to Run,” you may see things a bit differently.

A few weeks ago, Steve sent me an article that featured a Mexican Tribe: one that has become an interesting case study in health and endurance.  This group, known as the Tarahumara (pronounced Tara-oo-mara), has produced distance runners of mythical proportions and cultivated a lifestyle with an extremely low incidence rate.  Initially, I smelled a gimmick, but as the article plummeted further into the Copper Canyons, it became quite evident that this was more than a quick fix or a new fad.  These people were covering hundreds of miles of treacherous terrain…in sandals…and they do this for fun.

Well, it turns out this article was written by Christopher McDougall, and to my utter joy, he had a book about it.  What I would come to find out was that this work stretched far beyond a study of one tribe.  Complete with amusing back-stories, historical findings, and scientific analysis, this book serves well to entertain the reader while genuinely instilling the belief that there can be joy as well as purpose in our running.

You can’t help but appreciate the fact that the author (an average, overweight, injury plagued, forty-something) serves as his own guinea pig for the primary plot line.  Over the span of a year, he goes from a grim outlook (given by several top doctors), to completing a mountainous 50 mile race in 100 plus degree temperatures.  To spice things up, he is joined by some of the world’s top (and most interesting) ultra-marathoners, who bring with them a bevy of amusing and unbelievable stories.  Put simply, my Google search got a workout just to confirm that these people and places were real!

One of the longer, more informative, chapters actually focuses on the biomechanical relationship between the structure of the human body and how it relates to our running ability.  For an educated opinion, I put this section past my future brother-in-law (vet school student), but it all appears to check out.  In short, we are built for endurance.  Sure cheetahs are fast, but only for a few minutes.  Believe it or not, there are documented accounts of humans running animals to death…read that again.  Just for giggles, on your next jog, think about doing it for your own survival.

So, you are probably curious as to how any of this is applicable to the average Joe.  Well, here’s what I have taken from “Born to Run”:

1. Rethink Your Footwear - First of all, my Nikes have been relegated to the back of the closet.  After years of hip and back problems, as well as lackluster running form, I am skimming the pavement in my new Vibram Five Fingers.  The key here is to allow your feet to do the work they were intended for.  The only reason people run in a heel to toe rolling fashion is because Bill Bowerman (Oregon Track Coach and Nike Co-Founder) told them to.  Running with a barefoot-style forefoot strike will shorten your steps and bring you back to the ground; thus giving you more power and efficiency.  On a lunchtime run last week, I was literally having so much fun that I was smiling.  This, ladies and gents, has never happened in my history.  A homeless lady saw me coming and ever so originally yelled “Run, Forrest, Run!”  One word of caution: Make sure you transition slowly to a minimal cushion shoe like the Five Fingers.  Your feet need time to build the muscles that you haven’t been using.

2.  Change Your Perspective – Every now and then, it is good to forget the watch and just take off for a while.  I am absolutely guilty of staying within the bounds of specific mileages and times.  What I have learned recently is that I only have limits because I put them there.  Your body is capable of much more than you could imagine.  One day, just start running at a comfortable pace and see where the road (or trail) takes you.

3.  Eat Like You Care – The Tarahumara eat as if they could be headed for a run at any moment.  This means that they avoid meals that will bog them down and kill their energy.  Hey, I love food more than anyone (I’m captivated when a Taco Bell commercial comes on), but I certainly don’t like how tired and worthless I get after a big nasty meal.  When your training gets serious, your body inherently will crave what it needs, all you have to do is go along with it.

Happy Trails,

Chappy

I can attest to the fact that his book is in fact excellent bathroom reading.  Thanks again Chappy.

I finally got my Vibrams yesterday!

Last week I wrote about these crazy-ass FiveFinger shoes as an alternative to wearing expensive cushion-y running shoes.  I found a store in town that carried them, and picked up a pair late last night.  If you’re looking into getting some, I would HIGHLY recommend finding a place near you that sells them if possible so you can try them on before hand.  You can search for locations that carry them on Vibram’s site here. According to the sizing chart on Vibram’s site, I was between a 42 and 43.  After trying on a pair of each at the store, 42′s couldn’t even fit my toes, and 43′s fit perfectly.  Call around to the different stores and see if they have your sizes. Even if they don’t have the color you want, get the size right and then go home and order online.

I went with the Black KSO’s (“Keep s*** out”). If I had to describe how these things feel; it’s like wearing a wetsuit on your feet.  Very snug, but somehow still extremely mobile.  Looking down and running around for a few minutes, I can’t decide if I feel more like a Ninja or a gorilla.  Maybe a ninja gorilla, which is absurd – there’s no way humans would still be in power if ninja gorillas existed…but that’s neither here nor there.  Oh, and I also tried to do the thing like the person in this picture, but my toes aren’t nearly that spread apart yet.  Maybe one day. 

Running in Vibrams is DEFINITELY going to take some getting used to: I ran through the parking lot on the way to the gym, and I felt like a jackass because my running style had to change completely.  Instead of the long strides and heel-toe style, now it’s short strides, lands on the balls of your feet, and keep pushing.  I can see my calf muscles absolutely KILLING me after just a small jog, but that excited the hell out of me.  I have skinny legs so I figure making my calves strong as hell isn’t a bad side effect.

In the gym, I felt odd. And not just because of the weird looks I got from everybody in there, but because I really felt like I was walking around barefoot.  I only did three exercises at the gym because I only had 30 minutes – each felt slightly different compared to when working out in sneakers.  Doing deadlifts, I felt more in balance and actually managed to lift a new personal high.  Then, I did some (standing) shoulder barbell presses and felt a little wobbly with my feet, but I’m confident my feet and ankles will grow in strength along with the rest of my muscles.  I then ended with few sets of pull ups, and did a few more reps than normal.  I think doing pull ups in the vibrams really showed me how much fun these shoes are: it really felt like I was exercising in bare feet.

I’m already a convert. I’m actually looking forward to running this weekend, and I hate running.  Whenever I put on my FiveFingers, I just want to jump up and down, climb things, do some free-running, and then compete on Ninja Warrior.  Want to know how versatile these shoes are?  I typed this entire blog post with my feet while wearing them.

Okay that’s a lie, but that would have been cool, right? Check back next week when I write about my first running experiences.  I won’t be blogging on Monday because it’s a holiday here in the US, so see you Tuesday.

-Steve

Last night I had the chance to see “Up,” the newest film from masterpiece makers Pixar.  As usual, the film was preceded by a quick five minute short, this one entitled “Partly Cloudy.”  Although not as good as last year’s “Presto,” which had me laughing literally from the first frame to the end credits, “Partly Cloudly” managed to get quite a few chuckles, awwws, and the occasional belly laugh.  Enough about the pre-movie, let’s talk about the main event.

Up is a Pixar movie through and through. Incredible visuals, a soundtrack that perfectly sets the mood for each scene, and at least 20-30 moments where you shake your head in admiration at how clever these guys are!  I mean, this movie was better acted and provided more emotion and inspiration than any movie I’ve seen recently, and it’s all done with computer generated graphics.  I do have to warn you: after a comical five minute introduction to our main character, a young and enthusiastic Carl Fredericksen, the next 15 minutes are surprisingly dark and will tug at your heartstrings, daring you not to cry.  However, after the extremely sad beginning, the movie gets going and you’re allowed to smile once again.  We’re introduced to Carl as he is today: a grumpy old man in the twilight years of life, bearing a striking resemblance to Brooks from the Shawshank Redemption.  His childhood dreams of adventuring in South America have been replaced with waking up, eating breakfast, getting ready, and then sitting on his front porch to leer at passersby.

After he’s told he must vacate his house, this former balloon salesman decides to take matters into his own hands, tying thousands upon thousands of balloons to it and floats off into the great unknown, seeking adventure, all by himself.  Or so he thought.  Neighborhood kid Russell, dealing with abandonment issues of his own, needs only one more merit badge, “Assisting the Elderly,” to complete his scout training and get promoted to senior Adventure Explorer.  What begins as a strained (but funny) relationship expands into the kind of grandfather-grandson bond that makes you go “awwwww.”  Russell’s comedic timing, funny one liners, and a level of naive optimism that can only come from a kid provide great contrast to the pessimistic defeatist attitude of our old protagonist.  Throw in gorgeous scenery, talking dogs (one of which steals every scene he’s in), a bird named Kevin, and some great action sequences and we have another Pixar hit on our hands.  Kids will love the talking animals, funny noises, and slapstick humor, while Adults will laugh, cry, and probably reevaluate their own hopes and dreams.  It’s so good that it works extremely well on both levels.

I fully recommend this movie to anybody and everybody, no matter what age. “Up” proves that it’s never to late to start an adventure, no matter how old you are.  I left the theater with a big smile on my face and a huge desire to go on some adventures of my own; better start saving now.

Thanks Pixar, you’ve done it again.

-Steve

Where does this fit in the Pixar Hierarchy?  I’d say ahead of Ratatouille, Cars, a Bug’s Life, and the Incredibles…behind Finding Nemo and Toy Story, and right up there with Monsters Inc. and WALL-E.

Here’s the trailer for Up:

Up Trailer