November 28, 2023 - Covers, Oranges, Losing It, Sleepless

I discover the key to shedding holiday pounds may be to not fall asleep in a bed of orange peels on the Dark Side of the Moon.

Nuggets of Information:  Squaring the Circle

Last week Boo’s N.E.W.S. Muse Lisa and I watched a fascinating documentary on Netflix: Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis). Hipgnosis was the album art design studio that produced most of the iconic album covers from the late 60’s through the early 80’s.

In the late 1960’s, Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey “Po” Powell were approached by their buddies in Pink Floyd to design the cover for the band’s second album, A Saucerful of Secrets. From there, the studio’s work expanded, featuring partnerships with Led Zeppelin, Paul McCartney & Wings, 10cc, T. Rex, Black Sabbath, AC/DC, Genesis, Yes, ELO, Styx, Peter Gabriel, Bad Company and more.

Thorgerson and Powell took their firm’s name “Hipgnosis” from graffiti they found scrawled on the door to their flat in London. “Hip” meaning new, cool & groovy, and “gnosis” the Greek work for knowledge that signifies insight into humanity’s spiritual knowledge of the divine spark.

The documentary is great - with loads of archival footage and interviews with some of the musicians featured, including McCartney, David Gilmour, Roger Waters, Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, Peter Gabriel and Noel Gallagher. The process for creating these covers is fascinating - at times very rudimentary and physical, as Photoshop wasn’t a thing back then. The story around the creation of Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy cover is one of my faves.

You can watch Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis) on Netflix. Rolling Stone has a great article about Hipgnosis as well.

Enrichment: Orange You Glad I Didn’t Say Banana? 

Before you toss that orange peel in the trash, consider the findings of a team of Princeton University researchers regarding orange peels left alone for 16 years in a patch of forest land in Costa Rica. This article from Princeton’s High Meadows Environmental Institute explains how back in the mid 1990’s, 7-acres of barren pasture in a Costa Rican forest had 1,000 truckloads of orange peels and orange pulp dumped onto it, and was subsequently left alone, undisturbed, for 16 years.  

The initial idea came from the husband-wife team Daniel Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs, ecologists at the University of Pennsylvania. They worked at Área de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG, Guanacaste Conservation Area) in Costa Rica, focusing their careers on ensuring a future for endangered tropical forest ecosystems. In 1997, Hallwachs and Janzen worked out a deal with Del Oro, an orange juice manufacturer, for them to donate part of their forested land to the Área de Conservación Guanacaste in exchange for the right to deposit its orange juice waste for biodegradation on degraded land within the park. A year later, after 12,000 metric tons of orange peels & pulp were unloaded, a rival company, TicoFruit, sued Del Oro, claiming they had “defiled a national park.” The Costa Rica Supreme Court agreed, and that area of forest was basically ignored for the next 15 years.  

In 2013, Princeton Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology grad student Timothy Treuer was discussing potential research avenues with Janzen, when the idea of the site in Costa Rica came up. When Treuer visited the site, he was amazed at what he found.  

“It was so completely overgrown with trees and vines that I couldn’t even see the 7-foot-long sign with bright yellow lettering marking the site that was only a few feet from the road,” Treuer said. “I knew we needed to come up with some really robust metrics to quantify exactly what was happening and to back up this eye-test, which was showing up at this place and realizing visually how stunning the difference was between fertilized and unfertilized areas.” 

Treuer studied the area with Jonathan Choi, who, at the time, was a senior studying ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton. Choi turned the project into his senior thesis. 

“The site was more impressive in person than I could’ve imagined,” Choi said. “While I would walk over exposed rock and dead grass in the nearby fields, I’d have to climb through undergrowth and cut paths through walls of vines in the orange peel site itself.” 

The area fertilized by orange waste had richer soil, more tree biomass, greater tree-species richness and greater forest canopy closure. 

The paper, “Low-cost agricultural waste accelerates tropical forest regeneration,” was published Aug. 22 in Restoration Ecology. Additional support was provided by Princeton’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, the Office of the Dean of the College at Princeton University, the High Meadows Foundation, the Garden Society of America and Área de Conservación Guanacaste. 

Luckily Lisa loves eating Cuties, the little mandarin oranges. I have now requested her orange peels, and am depositing them in our yard in areas that need some improvement. I’ll report back my findings in November 2039.  

Workshop: Getting Rid of the Leftover Stuffing 

If you’ve read my other articles about eating, fasting and overall health, or if you’ve spent more than 5 minutes with me over the last two years, you know I am pretty focused on habits, routines, eating and wellness. To recap, over a 2-year period I made lots of small changes, which I incorporated into my daily routine that resulted in me losing a ton of weight, increasing my mental clarity, improving my energy, sleeping better, greatly reducing gut issues & inflammation, strengthening my relationships, building a website, starting a bowling league and launching this newsletter. I think that’s everything. To be perfectly honest, it really wasn’t that hard. 

Over the course of four days last week, we visited with a variety of friends at a variety of places a total of seven times. Many of these encounters involved big tables full of food. I approached each with shark-like fervor, never wanting to miss out on a delicacy, I made the most of each experience. Carby foods? Yes – pass the bread. The four food groups? Candy, Candy Canes, Candy Corn, Syrup! What time do we eat? All the time!

At no point did I feel like I was cheating or doing anything to feel guilty about. I didn’t develop any new “bad” habits or routines. I knew this was temporary, that I had earned the right to do this, and that I would go right back to my habits and routines that have worked well for me. I’d like to share the resumption of my routines with you over the next three issues of Boo’s N.E.W.S.. This week is the starting point. Over the next two weeks, I’ll share how I've fallen back into the patterns that work for me, and my progress.  

The Plan 

First thing is to enter ketosis – the state where I’m using my body’s fat stores for fuel. This starts with limiting carbs and focusing on protein and fat. The carbs I do consume will be mostly fiber. No sugars or refined carbs for sure.  

On top of this, I will resume fasting. The first few days I’ll do a standard 18-6 intermittent fasting routine. My eating window will be 2:00pm-8:00pm each day, unless I adjust it for any social gatherings. This weekend, I’ll switch to alternate day fasting – same 6-hour eating window, but every other day. (This is my favorite method of fasting.) During week 2, I will do a prolonged fast, mainly to trigger autophagy – the body’s process for cleaning out waste at the cellular level. I do this a few times a year, and really enjoy the benefits. Other than black coffee, I’ll only be consuming electrolytes. I’m thinking a 4-day fast will suffice, with 2 days of gradual refeeding afterwards. The reason I switch between these types of fasting is to force my body to adjust to new conditions – that helps prevent plateauing. 

I will hit a minimum of 10,000 steps a day. I walk each morning for 50 minutes, unless it is below 40 degrees, which it looks like it may be a few times in the next 10 days. That’s okay – I'll make it up at lunch time and late afternoon. (Our dog KP loves this plan, as he also needs to lose some holiday pounds.) If needed, I can go hop on the treadmill at the gym or walk the aisles at the grocery store. On the weekends I’ll do longer walks. If any Atlanta-area folks want to join me on a weekend walk, Saturday or Sunday mornings, let me know – I'll include a picture of us in an upcoming Boo’s N.E.W.S.!  

I’ll stretch each day, as I’m still working to lock that habit into my routine. I’ve also been piecing together a no-equipment workout – planks, squats, etc. I’m excited about this, as it is a new habit I am eager to develop and incorporate into my routine.  

Throw in a minimum of 7 hours sleep a day and 15 minutes a day of direct sunlight exposure, and I should be firing on all cylinders. I’ll update you next week on how it is going! 

Selected Content: Pulling an All-Nighter 

I’ve written about the benefits of sleep – how I personally shoot for 7 hours a night, and how off I feel if I don’t get enough. But I recently read a fascinating article about the positive benefits of pulling an all-nighter. According to the findings in this article from the journal Neuron, sleep deprivation leads to an increase in dopamine release – the “reward” neurotransmitter that boosts mood, motivation, and attention. It also influences behavior, movement, learning, and emotional responses. The article posits boosting dopamine could potentially offset feelings of depression and other mood disorders.

If you’ve ever stayed up all night, you may have felt a sense of being a little wired, or even delirious. According to Mingzheng Wu, postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University and first author of the study, “Interestingly, changes in mood state after acute sleep loss feel so real, even in healthy subjects, as experienced by myself and many others. But the exact mechanisms in the brain that lead to these effects have remained poorly understood.” 

Researchers conducted the study using mice as their subjects. They came up with a system where mice were kept awake, but in a low-stress environment. The observed behavior: the mice were more aggressive and hypersexualized, due to increased dopamine signaling. 

Next, researchers looked at how each of the four regions of the brain were releasing dopamine and silenced each of them one by one. The antidepressant effects persisted in the nucleus accumbens, hypothalamus and dorsal striatum, but went away when the prefrontal cortex was silenced. According to the study’s senior author Yevgenia Kozorovitskiy, “That means the prefrontal cortex is a clinically relevant area when searching for therapeutic targets. But it also reinforces the idea that has been building in the field recently: Dopamine neurons play very important but very different roles in the brain. They are not just this monolithic population that simply predicts rewards.” 

Researchers aren’t recommending everyone stop sleeping, as the problems from chronic sleep deprivation would quickly outweigh the benefits. But this could lead to new approaches to treating depression and other mood disorders. I think I’ll stick to my 7 hours of sleep a night. I’m at the age where going to bed at 10:00 is way more appealing than being some hypersexualized nightclub rat. I’ve mostly grown out of that phase.