I will divide this section of pearls into Diet and Exercise:

Diet Pearls

• Diet is everything.  Sorry to let you guys in on that little secret.  When my diet goes south for a while, so does my body.  Eating slowly, chewing your food, eating more organic, fresh vegetables and fruits, and less meat is critical.  I would say 70 to 80% of your struggle to look and feel better is due to good diet.
• Give up Coke and all sodas.  They are very acidic and not healthy for the body.  Coke can dissolve meat and clean concrete.  Just because you are drinking Diet Coke does not save you.  Fake sugars are equally bad and they are terrible for you.  People can develop cancers from having a body that is not pH balanced, i.e., acidic.  I drank a Diet Coke every day and never thought I could give it up but I did and have not had a soda can for two years now.  Buy pH strips from Amazon for a few dollars and make sure that your pH is at least 7 or higher.  You might be surprised to see how low your pH really is.  A low pH predisposes you to cancer.
• Give up caffeine if you can.  I stopped a year ago and I feel much better.  I do not have the up and down swings anymore.  When your body is totally fit you will not need to rely on caffeine.  Do I miss the taste?  Not really.  Not after awhile.
• Don’t blame genetics.  That is a sign of weakness.  We are actually more of a product of our environment, which we can control, than our genes.  Genetic risk of cancer is in general very low.  The number one risk for cancer is bad diet followed by a sedentary lifestyle.  If you control your diet, you seriously reduce the risk of cancer and of heart disease.  Look at the women who go from a low meat and dairy diet in Japan over to the United States who start getting a high incidence of breast cancer just like Americans do.  Diet is everything.
• We consume way too much sugar.  Start to cut down on your sugar intake but don’t replace it with aspartame or saccharine.  Those chemicals are truly bad for you and can actually spur your body on toward obesity.  Replace sugar if you have a sweet tooth with natural Agave honey or Stevia and do so in moderation.
• Get rid of all things white:  white sugar, white bread, and white rice.  Consume unpolished, brown rice only.  The Ezekiel brand, sprouted bread is amazing.
• Give up dairy.  Stop drinking milk of any kind, especially the conventional steroid-laden kind.  Cheese, ice cream, etc. are all bad.  When we talk about needing milk for growth and to prevent osteoporosis, that is pure bunk.  The best thing to limit osteoporosis is exercise to strengthen one’s bones.  It is questionable whether even calcium is needed.
• Give up OJ.  Drinking juice is a very sugary activity that even one glass a month can risk an increase in diabetes.  Don’t be afraid of fresh fruit, which is great for you, unless of course you are in fact diabetic.  Eating fruits are great for your body, skin, and to limit cancer.  Drinking juice is not.  Ideally, if you eat fruit, it is better to eat it on an empty stomach an hour before a meal.  It will raise your insulin and help you digest your food better and thereby burn more calories.  However, personally, I am used to eating fruit as a dessert after a meal (still good though).
• Shop at the edges of the grocery store and buy as many colored food items as possible.  Buy the rainbow of food colors.
• Do not eat any processed food, period.  I have stayed away from major fast food chains for two years now.  The cheap meats and the chemicals that are in there are nothing short of deadly.  If you do this one thing alone, you will be much healthier.
• Make small changes to your diet.  Many Americans (like myself) are radical and we make radical changes rather than baby steps.  Do one thing at a time.  Give up Coke then go from there.  Start small.
• A little cheating is ok.  Read The 4-Hour Body.  If you cheat with your meals once a week, it almost reprograms your body for weight loss.  However, when I cheat I still stay away from really bad foods like fried foods, soft drinks, and processed foods.
• Hara hachi bu- Japanese for eat until you are 80% full.  In the past I would eat until I was stuffed like a pig.  Now, if I eat to that point I will feel physically sick.  I eat until I am pretty full then stop.  If I just wait a few minutes, I will become full.  It takes our bodies 20 minutes to sense that we are full. Unfortunately, most Americans eat rapidly and finish their meals way under 20 minutes before our brain can even register that we are in fact full.
• Eat when you are hungry.  If I feel hungry, my body is telling me I need something so I eat something small.  I try to get in 2 small snacks between my meals but with my busy schedule I don’t always do that.  Smaller meals, more frequently program your body toward a greater metabolism that leads to faster fat burning.  I also try to avoid eating any meal for at least 3 hours before going to sleep.  I like the rule, “eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.”
• Avoid domino foods, like nuts and chips from a bottomless bag.  I eat nuts for my break (Brazilian nuts are great) but I take out 5 and plan on eating not a single one more.
• Drink plenty of cold water.  Cold water in particular makes your body’s metabolism speed up and it is also refreshing (except for Europeans who like to drink their water at room temperature.  Sorry for that.)  Rain Water is a great brand that is pH balanced.  Thanks Richard for that tip.  Otherwise for the sake of the environment, drink filtered water.
• Grow an organic garden if at all possible.  Gardens have so much more nutrition than even the produce you get from Whole Foods.  A study from the University of Irvine showed that organic vegetables have a much higher polyphenol content, a secondary metabolite that helps with a vegetable’s defense against bugs.  When there are pesticides, the polyphenol count goes down because the plant does not need to mount a defense against the bug.  We get a huge degree of our protection against illness and disease from polyphenols.  I have not been sick one day for over two years now, and I do not get the flu shot.
• Do not drink shakes to replace meals unless you do not have a healthier option.  I drink a blend of many vegetables in the morning but try to eat at least 1 to 2 hard food meals during the day since our body does better in processing real food and not shakes.  If you do not have a healthier option, by all means have a healthy shake.  For protein shakes (which are different), please read the exercise pearls section below.
• Read anything written by Michael Pollan.  I have summarized a lot of his work here in this blog series.  Go to the archives.  His magnum opus is The Omnivore’s Dilemma.  His shorter book that is equally great is In Defense of Food.  That book is actually what started my change toward better health so I owe a lot to him.  His newer short book of simply a list of rules (as I am doing here) is called Food Rules and even though I did not buy it because I have read all his other books I think it is brilliant.  However, for the non-reader, read Food Rules, as it summarizes all his thinking in pithy one-liners.
• If you are too lazy to read, please watch Food, Inc. It will change the way you see everything.  Michael Pollan is prominently featured in it.  It is an eye opener.
• Buy local food from local grocers as much as possible.  Grassfeed beef is so critical if you eat meat.  Cows were not meant to eat corn.  You will be surprised that local farmers can actually be cheaper than Whole Foods or other major chains.  Just get a dedicated deep freezer to store the meat, which will keep.
• Try not to eat out because it is not healthy for you.  My friends who eat out more like My Fit Foods, a place that has prepackaged healthy foods.  Don’t know if you have one near you or an alternative to that.  Whole Foods
• Be mindful of your food when you chew it.  Experience the taste of it rather than scarf it down.  Establish a positive relationship with food rather than a negative one.  Read Savor, a great book on mindfulness eating.
• Take fish oil and vitamin D. Omega-3s from fish oil regulate blood pressure, resting heart rate and limit sudden death, arrhythmias, etc.; and we simply do not get enough because we do not eat enough fish.  Salmon is the best source of omega-3s where tilapia followed by orange roughy are the worst on the list, i.e., those latter fish give very little omega 3s.  Do not eat farm raised fish but only wild.  (Avoid big fish like tuna that carry more mercury.  Watch the extras section of the DVD The Cove and you probably will not eat tuna again.)  We need to ingest (if we do not get it from fish) about 1000-2000 mg combined total of EPA and DHA per day so check the backside of your Omega-3 supplements to make sure that you are getting that quantity. With proper Vitamin D we can prevent arthritis, cardiovascular disease, depression, pain, cancer, osteoporosis, hypertension, diabetes, etc.  We should shoot for 40-60 ng/ml as a blood level with 30 ng/ml being insufficient and below 20 ng/ml being truly deficient.  A recommended dose of supplementation is 2000 IUs per day as a start.  In contrast most multi-vitamins only contain 400 IUs.

Exercise Pearls

• Before we talk about exercise, we should talk about sleep.  You must get 7 hours of sleep or more even if you tell me you do not need it, your body does.  When you don’t sleep enough you risk heart disease but even more importantly you will gain weight.  People that do not sleep enough simply start to gain weight because that is what our body does when it is deprived of much needed sleep.
• Use public accountability for your progress.  Too often we do everything in private and we do not have people who hold us accountable for our actions so we fall off the wagon very quickly.  Our January resolutions for the year disappear by the end of that month.  I post my before and after photographs on Facebook and I also have accountability meetings with my Entrepreneur’s group every month for metrics that I must uphold and attain.  Find an accountability partner that can help you achieve your goals and stick with them.  Your accountability partner has to be as serious as you are or it won’t work.  Give yourself a monetary penalty or some other form of shame if you don’t make your weight or your goals.
• Find friends that workout and eat right.  You are your friends.  The more you hang out with people that are overweight, who do not value exercise and diet, and who scoff what you do, the more that you will become like them.  A survey found that the more you associate with fit people, the fitter you become.  The more that you hang out with people who are not fit, the less fit that you become.  Sorry, that is the truth.
• Use three forms of body weight evaluations.  I use a caliper that I bought for $5 (to measure body fat), a Myotape for $5 (that easily allows you to measure body circumferences), and also an Omron body scale (all bought from Amazon) that measures percent body fat, muscle, visceral fat, BMI, etc.  (BMI is not important if you are already a muscle lean individual but it is a helpful measurement if you are a bit overweight.)  I heard of a cool device  theWithings body scale (thanks Richard Jensrud) that is a beautifully designed scale and wifi enabled to sync to your iPhone and to your PC all of your information like BMI, weight, fat percentage, and muscle percentage, but I saw one review on Amazon that says the body fat reading is not that accurate.  (I own the Omron and not the Withings body scale.)  Try to do the measurements at the same time of day and with the same relationship to food (that is before a meal preferably).
• There are three types of stretching:  static, dynamic, and ballistic.  We tend to do static stretches before a workout but they do not actually help minimize injury (they don’t increase injury risk either as some believe).  However, they can actually compromise performance when dealing with sports that require power and speed, which would be most sports.  Ballistic stretches are not that helpful either.  They involve rapidly moving back and forth motions.  Dynamic stretching, as advocated in the book Dynamic Stretching, involves movement activities like heel and toe walking, spiderman walking, air squats, high knee raises, etc., that can actually minimize injury and help with sports performance.  The best thing to do is to find movements that would mimic your sports activity (read Dynamic Stretching for more information).   However, static stretching after working out is great, and I do that after every workout for at least 5 minutes if not longer.  I have always wondered why we do dynamic forms of stretching before each Crossfit workout.  Now I know.
• Quit going to the gym.  What?  Well, don’t quit going to the gym but as you will see in what I have to describe I believe that traditional gyms are not the best way to get healthy, as I will shortly explain.
• To build a Spartan body will take years not weeks or months.  Many people get fooled by a before and after body that is seemingly a magical transformation.  In the 6 months that you see of my photos, I am still not close to where I would like to be, but that is part of the fun.  There is no end, just a journey like anything else in life.  Make it fun and stay on track for a lifelong journey of improvement.  Once you change your brain about exercise and diet, you can then take off.  Don’t think negative and don’t be impatient for the body you want.  Many people use quick fix remedies and try to lose all the weight quickly.  That leads to disastrous yo-yoing and skin problems as well as metabolic issues.  Plan on losing weight and build muscle slowly.  The joke is that the 300 workout will not give you a 300 body (a la the film).  The 300 workout was done as a test but not as a regimen, and also the casting directors already picked buff guys that had developed those bodies over years.  All they did was refine those bodies by adding harder workouts to get them even more refined for the movie.
• Muscle confusion is what I learned from finishing the home program P90X.  When our bodies get used to a certain program, we become very efficient at it.  This leads to a stop in growth or a plateau.  The more you change it up, the better.
• High-intensity interval training (or HIIT) is what I learned from completing the home program Insanity. (Do not do Insanity unless you are already totally fit or you will hurt yourself.)  If you perform very high intensity work with short breaks, you actually reset your metabolism higher so stop looking at how many calories you burn on the treadmill.  It does not matter.  You want to have a strong afterburn, i.e., how many calories you are burning in the next 2 days that follow your workout.  For free workouts, go to bodyrock.tv.  It is a great site for those who want a quick workout.  The lie is that you have to spend a lot of time in a gym to get fit.  All you need is 4 to 20 minutes at home doing high-intensity interval training with a good interval timer.  I have all the gadgets that are shown on bodyrock.tv including the Gymboss interval timer, a sandbag, dip bar, jump rope, but more about gadgets in a moment.  I also just downloaded the free app (Nike Training Club) for the iPhone that helps you with free HIIT workouts.  Have not used it yet.  Thanks Ashley from Crossfit for that tip!
• The best speed jump rope is Buddy Lee’s Aero Speed Hyperformance Jump Rope.  It is expensive ($40), and you can buy it on Amazon.com.
• The programs that I got from Beachbody that I mentioned above, P90X and Insanity, are great.  They are super intense and I would not advise them for someone who is out of shape.  You need to work into them.  However, what I love about them besides the fact that they are intense is that I can do them at home.  In the past, I would say I would never have had the dedication to work out at home because I felt that I needed a class to attend in a gym environment.  That all changed in late December 2010 when I realized that I did not need to go to the gym anymore.  Believe me, you do not need a gym and you will be disciplined enough to workout at home.  Once you have done this you will be amazed at your progress.  Your excuse that you can’t go to the gym because you have no time or you have to watch your kids is now officially gone.
• Do not use traditional Nautilus machines since they work your body unnaturally.  If you look at a powerlifter versus a sprinter, which body do you think looks more natural and attractive?  The answer obviously is the sprinter.  Doing compound exercises that require multiple muscles and balance create much leaner and more balanced looking muscles.  Mark Lauren’s book, You are Your Own Gym:  The Bible of Bodyweight Exercises, will help you understand how to use your bodyweight for exercises to get that body at home without needing a gym.  I recommend however push-up bars (I have the power bars by Tony Horton) to limit wrist strain and a great pull up bar (I love my P90X one).  I also have the Bowflex SelectTech 552 Adjustable Dumbbells that are amazing because you can dial in any weight without needing a rack of weights at home but be forewarned these dumbbells are expensive, costing about $400 for a pair.
• Work out in the morning.  I realize that if I don’t get my workouts in in the morning I have a good chance of not getting the workout in at all.  I try to workout 6 days a week if possible.  You really need to work out almost every day to get fit.  Those weekend warriors (which I was one of them) cannot get fit enough with working out twice a week.  It just won’t happen.  But as I mentioned above, start slow.  Start with a couple times a week and build slowly to 5 to 6 times a week.  Read the book, Younger Next Year, for more information on this idea.
• Crossfit- This is extreme again.  I love Crossfit gyms.  If you have never tried it and you are type A, you will love it.  Crossfit is HIIT training that incorporates Olympic weightlifting, kettlebells, etc., in short bursts that are all timed to measure your fitness and intensity.  It is truly max effort of 100% that really is the epitome of HIIT.  Please consult a doctor before trying this (or anything I have recommended) and be careful if you have body injuries, as Crossfit may worsen them if you are not careful.
• Active.com is dedicated to triathletes.  What I learned from this site is that when we constantly stress our bodies just a little bit more, our bodies grow from that stress.  However, if we do not listen to our bodies and push through injuries, we lead to injuries that really set us back, if not indefinitely so.  So the second half of this advice is listen to your body.  When it is in pain, stop.  I have come to realize two types of pain: muscle soreness (to me a good thing but then I back off on that area until the soreness dissipates) and ligament and joint pain (by all means, STOP!)
• Get bodywork done.  I believe that structural integration or rolfing is the best body manipulation that exists.  Michael Solberg, a structural integration expert in my building, has literally saved my body from injury.  Over time you start to understand how your body feels and moves; and it is amazing how in tune you become with your body. I literally can guide Michael on where the restriction is and what needs to be done because I am so in tune with my body (but he really does not need my help).  Structural integration is focused on releasing fascial (connective tissue) scarring that occurs from just daily living not to mention being a surgeon and an intense fitness devotee.  I also get deep-tissue massages whenever I can in my spa (or when I am traveling).  Good bodywork is so important as part of any fitness regimen and limits the potential for injury and allows you to advance safely.
• Do yoga (or pilates).  I am a huge fan because it also saves my body from injury.  When we only do compression workouts (everything I have described until this point), we risk injury and shorten our bodies.  Yoga helps me stretch out my body so that I limit the risk of injury but also shape my body favorably.  Although structural integration helps me release much of the tightness that yoga helps me do as well, it is not enough.  Yoga builds 25% more muscle strength and toning when muscles are eccentrically stimulated.  In addition, yoga increases peace, mindfulness, balance, neural integration, posture, and flexibility.  These are all important things to have.  If you are not enjoying your yoga experience, it is most likely due to two things:  inexperience in the field and also choosing the wrong studio.  Many gyms that offer yoga offer a “yoga light” version.  You should try to find a dedicated studio that matches the style that you like.  I cannot recommend a particular style of yoga since you will find what works for you.  However, personally I love vinyasa flow yoga.  I can promise you that I sweat three times more at yoga than I do at Crossfit or running but my heart rate is lower throughout, and I do not do hot yoga.  (Btw, a great yoga mat that absorbs sweat and does not slip when wet is called “The Mat” by the great clothing designer, Lululemon.  I stopped using my yogitoes.  Thanks Allie for the tip!)
• You must take Whey protein (I recommend Jay Robb since it is from grassfed cows that are not steroid injected) mixed with some kind of fruit immediately after your workout.  I cannot emphasize enough how important this is.  Your body goes into a catabolic (destructive) state after your workout and you are more prone to injury and will try to retain fat if you do not replenish it with nutrients.  Eating a piece of chicken won’t cut it.  Your body needs broken down protein (Whey is the best) and some kind of glucose (fruit is the best) to drive the protein into your cells.  You can build muscles (don’t worry ladies you will not get big if you are not on steroids) and burn fat better if you take this protein shake after a workout.  A protein shake is very low calorie typically and is not intended as a meal replacement.  Thanks Marzia for this tip.  She also recommended taking a combination of glutamine and branch chained amino acids (BCAA) to help with muscle recovery if you are as intense as I am about your fitness training.  Skip the creatine.  It is not good for your body.
• Get good shoes.  Actually get rid of your shoes.  The more padding you have in your shoes the more joint problems you can have.  Our feet are one of the most complex parts of our body.  We were programmed to run and move barefoot.  When we wear padded shoes, we lose proprioception (feeling of the ground below us), which causes us to bang our joints even harder without us knowing it.  Switching our workouts over to a relatively barefoot or minimalist style shoe should be done slowly because you will have injuries if you do so too quickly and do not build up enough foot strength.  Some brands that I recommend are Vibram FiveFingers (the ultimate), Vivo Barefoots, and Merrells.  (If you love Nikes, get the Nike Frees.  I use those to walk in on my vacations.  I prefer those as walking shoes and the Vibrams and Vivos for running where I am forced to run on my forefoot.  But I like to walk by striking my heels so Nike Frees are great for a lot of walking, as you do in Manhattan.)  Learn more about my feeling about barefoot techniques in the section below on running.
• For runners, I would recommend reading Chi Running (and the DVD) and Barefoot Running.  They have both changed the way that I see running.  As mentioned above, the type of shoes you wear can truly destroy you or help you.  60 to 80% of runners injure themselves.  This is an alarming statistic.  This can be easily avoided if one small thing were changed:  moving from a heel strike to a forefoot or midfoot strike.  The reason that most runners run by striking with their heels is that they wear shoes that are too padded and allow them to do that.  If you change your shoes to a minimalist one or even try running for a few steps by striking your heel without shoes you will be screaming in pain.  Our body will not allow that.  When we strike our foot with our heels we transmit 7 to 8 times our body weight through our ankles, shins, knees, hips, and lower back.  Strike with your forefoot and read the books that I have recommended and you can avoid injury.  Again, start slowly and do not run very much when starting barefoot even if you are an experienced runner because you will injure yourself if you do not build up foot strength first.
• Eric Franklin balls and imagery.  I have just purchased these so I cannot speak much for them yet but am excited to incorporate them.  They are rubber balls that build up strength in your toes and make your body conscious of injuries and help you work through areas of tension through related imagery.  You can get the book and balls on Amazon.
• For swimmers, read Total Immersion.  This book will help you swim much more efficiently and with less fatigue.  The concept of this book like Chi Running is to work with your core rather than your arms and legs.  We too often think that swimming is an arms and leg activity when it should not be.  When we swim with our cores rotating us then we use that as the engine and the arms and legs as propellers.  It has changed my relationship to swimming.  Great goggles that I love are the Italian-made Aqua Sphere Kayenne:  they are sexy and do not leak.
• Get a kettlebell.  Kettlebells as popularized by ex-Soviet Pavel Tsatsouline are an amazing way to workout and build total body strength, lose weight, and tone your body in virtually minutes.  I got this idea from Crossfit but more importantly from the book, The 4-Hour Body.  The one that I own is the Weider version that allows for different interchangeable weights and I totally recommend watching the DVD, Enter the Kettlebell, by Pavel Tsatsouline.  You do not need to buy the book.  The DVD will help you minimize injury and optimize your form.
• TRX system.  The TRX system is a great bodyweight trainer that I own.  I use it for atomic pushups and to work out my back.  Just Google it to see what it can do.
• Buy a sandbag.  The purpose of the sandbag is to make your muscles adjust as you lift the bag thereby improving balance and firing off more muscles recruited during the exercise.  The best one to buy on the market is the Ultimate Sandbag, which is a bit pricey but worth it for the quality.  You have to buy some Play Sand for a couple of bucks from Home Depot to fill it up.
• For indoor cyclists, I love Spinervals training DVDs.  I use that at home on my home exercise bike.  They really get you through a spin class without having to attend one.  I did spin class for ten years but now I only integrate a spin class a couple of times per month to mix up my other routines.  I think just doing spin all the time can make your body too used to the same motion, and as mentioned above make it too efficient leading to stunted improvement in overall fitness goals.

As all of you know, I am not a fitness expert and value the input of my dear colleagues who are.  I would also like to thank them for their valuable assistance and guidance in helping me be more fit.  Why be more fit?  So that you look and feel better than you ever have.  As Todd Whitthorne from Cooper Aerobics said, it is about “squaring off the curve”.  What that means is that our lives should be rock solidly high in quality and then we die one day, which unfortunately is inevitable.  This is opposed to how most of our bodies go without proper diet and exercise, which is a slow downturn until we barely can wipe applesauce off our chins on the day we die.  One day you will wake up barely able to get out of bed with chronic pain.  But remember the words of Jake Lalanne who was doing bench presses a week before he died at 96 years of age: “Inactivity is the killer, and remember, it’s never too late.” Hope you found this blog inspiring and also I am open to your input, as I am always learning too!

Okay, before you guys get too excited about this one, I am not talking explicitly about sexual intimacy (actually a little bit not a lot). Obviously, when reading the works of a Buddhist monk, you won’t get too much sage advice regarding sexual matters, or at least I hope not. What I am talking about is connecting with other human beings at the core level of humanity. Let me explain.

The Dalai Lama talks about how oftentimes we as humans see barriers of difference between us like our skin color, age, sex, religion, political views, education, social status, etc. However, the common linkage between all of us sentient beings is our humanity. Next time you see another person in front of you, try to remove all the trappings that separate you two and look “intimately” at their core self, which is their humanity. By doing so, we achieve a connectedness with one another that not only shapes the other person in front of us but it shapes us as well in a positive way.

Obviously, nurturing relationships of a romantic and sexual nature are part of what we seek in life. However, we can eliminate loneliness, oftentimes the driving force behind our actions, by becoming connected with all human life in an “intimate” way (no, not sexual.) When Dr. Cutler asked the Dalai Lama in the book, The Art of Happiness, whether he ever felt loneliness. The answer was immediate and succinct, “No.” Now, how did a monk who lived his entire existence without female companionship not feel loneliness? In short, because of his profound intimacy with human nature.

As a great exercise to start (hopefully to become innate over time for all of us), try to look at every human being today as a human being stripped of all manner of social rank, status, color, gender, etc. And connect with them. If you start to connect on a daily level with every human being you encounter as a human being and nothing further, feelings of loneliness and disconnect will begin to fade. I think it is a great way to live life and a way that can help us achieve a happiness that will be greatly returned as another individual radiates that warmth back and thereby escalates our happy state. Today’s blog is a prerequisite understanding for tomorrow’s on compassion.

On the subject of romantic intimacy, the Dalai Lama did have some words of wisdom. He noted those marriages that failed were ones based solely on physical attraction. Although physical attraction can draw two individuals together, that bond is fleeting. In order for that intimacy to endure, it must be founded on a deeper level of mutual respect. Oftentimes, romance as captured on celluloid works on a fundamental level of idealization of the other partner without the perception of the other as a human being but merely as an object. When the human flaws begin to poke through the cracks, which they inevitably do, the lust of the other as an object will be easily and irrevocably tarnished. Wise words from a monk!

P.S.: I’M REALLY HAPPY TO REPORT THAT AFTER MONTHS OF WORK, MY WEBMASTER HAS LAUNCHED AN ENTIRELY NEW BEFORE AND AFTER GALLERY. SHORTLY AFTER I LAUNCHED MY FLASH VERSION TO REPLACE MY HTML VERSION I REALIZE HOW NON-INTUITIVE MY NAVIGATION WAS SO I HAVE REPLACED IT WITH A VERSION THAT I THINK OFFERS THE BEST OF THE FLASH AND HTML VERSIONS. YOU CAN EVEN LEAVE COMMENTS ON MY BEFORE AND AFTERS. THE SLIDESHOW FUNCTION DID NOT SEEM TO WORK LAST NIGHT. I HAVE MY WEBMASTER WORKING ON THAT AND THERE ARE A FEW MISSING THUMBNAILS BUT I THINK YOU WILL REALLY LIKE THE FUNCTIONALITY AND FORM OF MY NEW GALLERY. YOU MAY ALSO NOTICE THAT THE THUMBNAILS ROTATE EVERY TIME YOU VISIT THE SECTION. HERE IS AN EASY LINK TO IT.

I just finished the book, The Art of Happiness, which involves teachings of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and his conversations with Phoenix psychiatrist Howard C. Cutler, M.D. Dr. Cutler tries to explore the ideas of Buddhist thought as preached and practiced by the Dalai Lama, as they would be explicable and applicable to non-Buddhists in the West. During this time of financial vicissitudes, we can perhaps learn a lot from global thoughts that antedate and continue to flourish during our lives from the Far East. I will not summarize the book but focus on select topics that have personal resonance for me that I thought would be helpful for my readership. These blogs represent an attempt for me at personal growth and self awareness and are letters written to myself that if burnished well will radiate to all those who are interested enough to read them.

The Dalai Lama believes that happiness is the singular purpose of life that supercedes all other concerns or at least represents the fundamental distillation of what our life should be about. At first glance, this comment seems to belie a monkish disposition and compel one to think that a monk is advocating some kind of dissolute, hedonistic life. Rather, as you read through this 5-part series, you will see that in fact the opposite is the case. In short, altruism and compassion are rooted in one’s own inner happiness.

As mentioned, we think that if we are to pursue happiness, we are in fact elevating our selfish nature. However, if we stop to think of how truly happy individuals can radiate kindness, compassion, and love to others; whereas, unhappy people pass on their disgruntled demeanor and horde and heave hatred and displeasure to all who encounter them. If we start with understanding how to reach a deep and meaningful happiness, we can use that as a launching point to help others. In fact, the act of helping others can be a truly happy action to take. But more about that later this week.

If life is for living, how else can we live but in a happy state. Living in a depressed, angry, or self-tormented condition will only lead to an unbearable state that contravenes our very nature. We were not born to live in misery. In fact, in one part of the book when Dr. Cutler asks the Dalai Lama about self-hatred, he received a befuddled silence in response. The Dalai Lama simply could not understand what this concept meant, as he had never encountered it in his sheltered world. If our fundamental nature is designed for happiness, then how can we achieve it? We will explore the following concepts over this next week: contentment, intimacy, compassion, and confronting suffering to draw broad strokes within which you can create finer etchings that will define your own existence.

A DISCO CHRISTMAS

A TEXAS CHRISTMAS

Believe it or not, I am actually taking a short break today and not writing a blog. What? I guess I am sort of writing one by writing this. Okay, this is not truly a thought-provoking blog but a jolly good Christmas cheer to all who celebrate Christmas. For those who do not, I wish you a Happy Hanukkah, Merry Kwanzaa, Happy Festivus or simply Happy Holidays. My sister sent me this crazy card, and I decided to create my own versions with my staff just for a good laugh and possible smile. My patients have truly become part of our LFP family. All of us here at LFP wish you and yours a joyous and restful Christmas holiday, as we are closed ourselves for the remainder of the week to enjoy this blessed time.

I spent close to 5 straight months in Asia partly out of recreation and partly for my education in cosmetic surgery of the Asian face. My true travelogue came in the form of a published book (Cosmetic Surgery of the Asian Face, Thieme Medical Publishers) and about 10 published papers from my time over there. The series of blogs this week will be an informal and admittedly non-scientific remembrance of things past.

I wanted to start this week with my favorite Asian city of all, my hometown where I was born, Hong Kong. I have been back to Hong Kong on multiple trips starting in my childhood with my last trip just the past year when I lectured to YPO/WPO (Young President’s Organization/World President’s Organization). When I returned to HK as a child and adolescent I had a tremendous time with all my extended family and relatives. Little by little that number dwindled due to an en masse emigration prior to 1997, the year that the British returned their crown colony to the PRC. Fear of that transaction and any ensuing economic instability compelled many of my relatives to depart their hometown for the Occident.

My childhood remembrances were always centered around Kowloon. For the uninitiated to HK geography, the city is divided principally into the continental half, Kowloon, and Hong Kong island. Kowloon is suburbia but features such glorious landmarks like the Peninsula hotel, where I had my lavish 1-year-old birthday party decked out with a puppy dog birthday cake, as far as I recall from my mom’s recounting and worn photos.

It was my last two trips (including my extended stay in HK for one month during the 5 months of my Asia trip) that I would like to focus on. During those trips, I was able to see the insular HK side in much greater detail and really enjoyed the bustling urban scape that was different from Kowloon. “Central” is the name of the area that is the core of the HK side where the height of opulent commercialism is in full display: Armani, Loro Piana, etc. The nightlife in Lan Kwai Fong, the cobbled and terraced bar district, offers the insomniac their own Xanadu. Of course, the food in HK is nothing short of what I would consider divine ambrosia. It didn’t hurt that my best friend Timmy with whom I grew up stayed in a palatial residence overlooking the harbor and who permitted me to stay with him during my trip. This past year when I was lecturing in HK I stayed at the Mandarin Oriental (the original) and can remember fondly and vividly all of the grandeur of my stay: my daily ritual consisted of working out with the Kinesis system (if you haven’t tried this, you have to find one) overlooking the harbor, then going downstairs to sate myself on an entirely freshly made breakfast (preserves, eggs, coffee, wow!). My nights were spent with my cousins and friends who lavished on us expensive, elaborate repasts that would rival the feasts of kings.

If you can ever make it to my hometown, I would highly recommend it. In fact, Emina, my hair-transplant coordinator, just got back from multiple cities in the Orient and intentionally only saw little of Hong Kong so that she would have an excuse to go back to what she called her favorite city. I understand and concur. Tomorrow we travel to Tokyo!

Satisfaction and complacency are not words that I know. I am grateful for the stellar reviews of this website, but I want to continue to refine and make this website more user friendly and more extensive in its scope. With that, I am rolling out the beginning of some major additions and changes to this site that will probably take 6 months to a year to complete in full. I have been working on some of these preliminary elements for over 6 months now with my webmaster with a focus specifically to help out-of-town patients get in and get out of Dallas more easily and to make their stay more seamless, enjoyable, and less difficult.

As a huge percentage of my patients come in from out of town, I am trying to help them out. In fact, I cannot remember a day in the last 3 to 4 months that a patient did not come in from somewhere out of town, state, or country. With that in mind, I have aimed to streamline this large percentage of my practice in a unique way through a custom-built “hospitality kit”. I would like to thank Jeff from Chicago who came up with and executed in great detail his idea of a “hospitality kit”, which in short is intended to help the out-of-town visitor truly be able to visit Dallas effortlessly and with less trepidation. He was the $5000 contest winner with his elaborate idea of the hospitality kit, which I am presenting today.

Some of the features of the hospitality kit include 360 virtual tours of the various hotel rooms in Plano and the immediate surrounding area that I personally shot and edited; a video tour through the hotels and attractions as well as my building to familiarize you with the Plano area; a custom-built map that permits you to view Plano and attractions that include restaurants, hotels, laundry services, tech services, atms, banks, book stores, etc.; full menus from area restaurants that feature takeout and delivery focused on the recovering patient; a peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing on travel assistance so that an experienced patient can help a prospective one; a list of DVD movies that you can rent from me including a player for no charge; a new concierge service that is both reasonably priced and offers such amenities as fully stocking your refrigerator with items you request in advance of your stay; and the whole shebang can be downloaded as a single pdf file for your convenience to help in planning your trip to DFW (the pdf feature should be live within 1 to 2 days).

Btw, even though my hospitality kit launches today, it is already in need of an update! I just learned of two new hotels opening in West Plano that I have not had time to explore but look absolutely amazing: Aloft and Nylo. For the first time, West Plano is getting extremely COOL hotels here! I am really excited. I have already made some comments in the new Patient Submitted (in this case I submitted) Travel Assistance section.

In addition, you can now see additional features (that we are still working on at this time) including web tutorials in which I personally navigate you through parts of this website that may interest you but you cannot find given that this website has now expanded beyond 3,500 total pages (I have just finished shooting all those videos last night. My webmaster just needs to upload them and put the page together). An updates section that automatically lists each day what sections have been recently updated (this should be up today or tomorrow). Besides the blogs and forum section, I update many sections almost daily so you might not know, for example, that I added a new video testimonial or photos from Emina’s trip to Tibet (which i just did) but now you will not have to scour the site for those changes. It will be listed with a direct link to the change in the updates section. Many thoughtful visitors have sent an email to me or my staff about problems they were facing with videos, text, pages, etc. not loading correctly. Now, that problem can be sent directly to the webmaster through “Report Bug” in which the problem page is already flagged when the message is sent. (Also, I will be radically overhauling your video experience in the coming months to make some of the infrequent problems much less frequent or eliminated all together.) I hope these changes will make your visit to LFP a much more enriching, educational, and enjoyable experience!

Today I turn the tender age of 40! I celebrated with friends and family this past weekend (see photo), with my sister and my brother-in-law flying in to offer me their best wishes from New York as well as some “over the hill” balloons and a cake that read “Oh No The Big 40″ for fun.

Of course, at this juncture I pause reflectively on my life’s journey thus far. I was on a date last week and was asked, “Do you have any regrets?” I said, “No. I never have regrets.” I think the past is something we can’t change but helps guide us for a better future. I would say that I have had a lot of learning during the 40 years I have graced this planet and hope that I can become a better person every day forward.

Too often we become the sum of our accomplishments or a sum total of our past. I can look at the writings and surgeries that I have accomplished and all the patients I have been so fortunate to touch their lives and feel deep satisfaction. Yes, that is fantastic and quite an honor for me. But, more importantly, I look forward to the future and what is in store for me during life’s journey. If we look at life like a journey (as mentioned in yesterday’s blog), we can savor the ride and look forward to the next road stop coming up.

My spa director, Linda, said to me “Dr. Lam, you are 99.9% right about things.” I said, “No, perhaps in life I am only 70% right but the 30% of the time that I make a mistake, I don’t make that mistake twice or try terribly hard not to repeat that error.” I am in a constant battle to be more self aware, which I think is the most critical thing that we can do. We need to be a better person tomorrow than who we were yesterday. As I mentioned in this blog, my organization EO (Entrepreneur’s Organization), also affectionately known as “AA for Business Owners”, helps me focus on my personal and professional growth.

I am very grateful for where I am today and look forward to where I can become in coming years! I would like to thank the love of my family, the love of my staff, the love of my friends, and the love of my patients who have buoyed me all these years and will do so I hope for many years to come. I leave you with this birthday card wish I received: “My birthday wish for you is that you always have people to laugh with and be close to, things to dream about and work hard for, places you can go to rest and reflect on all that is good in the world and especially in you…and may you always know how much you are thought of and loved.”

Wall Drawing #146. All two-part combinations of blue arcs from corners and sides and blue straight, not straight and broken lines. September 1972

We are going to define a different type of culture than the last 3 days of blogs: a little more refined culture so to speak (just kidding). As you would surmise, these blogs are about getting to know me, your surgeon, a little bit better and for me to reach out to you, the reader, with my aesthetic sense of what I consider beautiful. Of course, if you do not like modern art, this blog will be devastatingly boring or foolish. My buddy, Mark Wettreich, who owns an incredible European Art Gallery that focuses on “real art”, would look askance at this blog. I doubt Mark reads my blogs. However, if you are, please stop reading here.

Perhaps the best way that I conceive of my art is of its high graphic design quality. In essence, I really appreciate good design. It appeals to me fundamentally at every level. I love beautifully designed clothing, furniture, cars, anything really (and you know by now my obsession with Apple.) I would have loved to have been an industrial designer. Johny Ive move over (he is the Apple brainchild who has revolutionized the world more times than I can remember.)

Okay, now to the core of this blog. I absolutely love Sol LeWitt. He just died last year. He was an amazing American artist whose structure, clean, and graphic sense of the world I absolutely loved. I am going to insert here my paper that I wrote for the Archives of Facial Plastic Surgery in 2003, which never saw the light of day since the editorial board believed (perhaps rightly so) that my monograph on art did not highlight the beauty of the face. Well, besides the editorial board, you will be the first to read this article that never got published:

“Wall-to-Wall Beauty”

Samuel M. Lam, M.D.

Although Sol LeWitt has produced a prodigious amount of art over the past half century – from sumptuous two-dimensional geometric prints to elaborate three-dimensional cubed lattices, his most significant contribution to the art world remains the wall drawing. When asked if the sobriquet “originator of wall drawings” properly applied to him, he replied, “I think the cave men came first.” His cheeky reply aptly evokes his self-dismissive attitude that permeates his entire life and career. He has constantly upheld the primacy of ars gratia artis and subserved his ego to his artistic ambition. He often declines to attend media events in his honor, arriving late or not at all, and has refused to pose for a portrait by his celebrated artist friend, Chuck Close, because he wanted the public to pay attention only to the art rather than the artist. Even the large-scale retrospective of his work that opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2000 required years of coaxing before he could be convinced that he should participate, given his concentration on the future direction of his art rather than the past.

Part of an entrenched anti-commercialism is expressed in the very idea of a wall drawing. Unlike canvassed works that can be bought and sold as a commodity, a wall drawing lacks this vital attribute of market viability. Although LeWitt never explicitly foreswore a commercial intent, he stated, “I never think about selling a work while doing it.” LeWitt had even naively proposed that any artist that desired to replicate his wall drawings could do so to widen the public consumption of his work but has since retreated from this untenable position given the inferior reproductions that were spawned without his oversight. LeWitt’s massive wall projects are often executed by hired hands under his supervision, as he subscribes to the Conceptualism school that embraces the artistic idea more than the mechanical process, so long as the construction effort remains true to the original design. In fact, the colossal wall installations that are delicately fabricated for a specific site are often completely destroyed at the conclusion of the prescribed event.

LeWitt embarked on his first wall creation in 1968 for a group show at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York. He wanted a medium that could offer him the most two-dimensional representation of his two-dimensional art, in a word, flatness. He wanted his created work to convey its true two-dimensional essence, which could not be accomplished on a canvas that by its very nature was a suspended three-dimensional object. Beyond this consideration, the artist was motivated by early twentieth-century Russian art that celebrated visual art within the context of a defined setting. His architectural sensibility may have also been partly informed from LeWitt’s time spent in I.M. Pei’s studio a decade earlier. His later sculptural monuments would also resonate with architectural vibrancy. This pairing of art and architecture achieved its fullest expression in the German Bauhaus and the Dutch De Stijl movements of the early twentieth century that prefigured LeWitt’s efforts fifty years later.

LeWitt’s contemporaries of the 1960s were also explicitly and subtly exploring the immediate environment in which their art was displayed. Dan Flavin’s fluorescent light sculptures illuminated the entire room in which they were exhibited and cast a luminescent glow and shadow on neighboring walls, floors, and ceilings. In fact, Flavin is credited with introducing to LeWitt the expressive and intellectual nature of serial, permutated forms that would become an integral element in LeWitt’s idiom. Donald Judd’s wall-mounted sculptural pieces were also intimately tied to the wall from which they were suspended. Similarly, Andy Warhol canvassed the Castelli Gallery with Cow Wallpaper, a work that must have resonated with LeWitt; and Eva Hesse’s Accretion that consisted of numerous fiberglass tubes propped along the expanse of a blank wall echoed LeWitt’s aesthetic ethos. Despite all of these varied concurrent artistic endeavors, LeWitt would most fully exploit the architectural interior and transform it with his site-specific wall installations.

Over the past thirty years LeWitt has continued to evolve his style of wall drawings from the intimate to the dramatic. Initially conceived in the 1960s, his drawings represented little more than transference of his paper drawings to the wall without a premeditated link to the environment in which it would be presented. In the early 1970s, he began to develop an artistic idea more specifically for the physical space that it would occupy. In Wall Drawing #51 in Turin, he hired three draftsmen to connect every architectural point on the wall (light fixtures, door knobs, wall corners, etc.) to each other in every conceivable combination using blue chalk. In 1975, his art underwent a transformation yet again: he began to alter the background wall color to suit his artistic needs rather than be satisfied with the typical, preexisting white facade. He relinquished part of his artistic control to his draftsman, ordering only that “White lines from the center of a [black or yellow] wall [be connected] to specified random points” as would be determined by his skilled draftsmen. By the 1980s, LeWitt’s work achieved a strong visual vitality through use of bold geometric shapes and vibrant color schemes. LeWitt himself has commented that the newfound boldness of his work reflected the size and grandeur befitting the architectural space. His wall drawings continued to expand in scale to occupy neighboring walls, adjacent rooms, and even moving out to the outdoor environment. By the 1990s, LeWitt began to use acrylic as his favored medium rather than pencil, crayon, and India ink, which he had relied on in the past. Although LeWitt still refers to his collective works as “wall drawings”, use of acrylic transformed his drawings into paintings. The austerity of his early works gave way to the playful exuberance of his acrylic pieces that exuded bright, saturated, glossy colors with a simplified geometric vocabulary. Despite all of the intellectual rigor that LeWitt has applied to his art through his writings and advocacy of the Conceptual movement, his oversized wall drawings provide an immediate, seductive appeal that remains truly unique in twentieth-century art.

Horst Schulze, the former president of the Ritz Carlton, penned his famous Ritz Carlton motto, “Ladies and Gentlemen Serving Ladies and Gentlemen” at the tender age of 15 for a term paper in hotel school. Mr. Schulze explains how he came up with these famous words, “I started in the hotel business when I was 14 years old as a busboy. When my mother took me to the hotel to work for the first time, she said, ‘We could never go to this hotel. This is only for important people. For important, fine people. So you’re lucky. Behave yourself. Wash your hands.’ She was a typical mother. I went to the hotel and the general manager talked to my mother and me for 15 minutes and told us we could never be like the guests who came to his hotel. ‘So don’t ever get jealous. This is for Ladies and Gentlemen–very important people.’

“By the time I started working in the restaurants, I knew the guests were very important. But a few months later I realized that the maitre d’ I watched every day was just as important because every guest was proud when he talked to them. Why? Because he was a first-class professional. He was somebody special–because of the excellence he created for the guests. So when I went to hotel school about a year and a half later, the teacher asked me to write a story describing what I felt about the business. And I wrote about the maitre d’ at my hotel. I titled it, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen Serving Ladies and Gentlemen.’ I wrote we could be excellent like he was…absolute excellence. When you walked into a room, you know he was there. In any moment all of us who serve can be Ladies and Gentlemen, just like the guests. I think it’s a powerful thing that shouldn’t be missed by the wonderful people in the industry. They should understand that.”

I truly believe that my fine staff that work with me are true representatives of the motto. They are real Ladies and Gentlemen. As much as I expect my staff to treat you as Ladies and Gentlemen. I expect you to treat them as Ladies and Gentlemen. Remember that all of us in life are Ladies and Gentlemen serving Ladies and Gentlemen.