The Informed Table

A printable, free resource Motivation is a shaky foundation for a workout habit. It shows up when everything’s calm and disappears the moment you’re tired, busy, or having a rough week, which is most weeks. I built this resource because I have a hard time making time to work out too, and I wanted something…

When I was fourteen, I visited my uncle and his family in Denmark. Whether we were in Helsingør or Bornholm, one cultural difference genuinely surprised me. At least in 1999, no one ate alone. Every meal was a shared one. For a kid who was used to skipping breakfast or scarfing a sandwich between classes,…

For decades, sugar has been cast as the dietary villain, the thing secretly responsible for everything wrong with your health and your weight. But the biology is more nuanced than that, and that fear has caused more confusion and shame than is helpful. Here’s a useful distinction that gets lost in most of the conversation:…

Something happens when I stroll through the Hillcrest farmers market. My pace slows, my attention narrows, and I start moving through it the way I imagine my ancestors moved through the actual world: scanning, assessing, calculating what’s worth stopping for. Our brains still run ancient foraging software. Dopamine is particularly sensitive to novelty and uncertainty,…

What food makes you feel most alive? I was not an adventurous child at the table. My diet, to the extent it could be called one, was built on meat, bread, pasta, and cheese. Vegetables were largely suspect, and I ate around them. And then one day my dad put an artichoke in front of…

On Sunday we lost Frank, our 15-pound Chihuahua rescue. I’ll be honest: I haven’t been able to think about much else this week, so this newsletter is going to reflect that. He was only six. His death — from an aggressive form of vestibular disease — was sudden. A little about Frank: he had a…

The collision between nourishment and caregiving You know her. Maybe you are her. She’s the one who shows up at her father’s nephrology appointment with a list of questions and a folder of lab results. She spends her lunch hour on hold with the insurance company, making sure her son’s prior authorization goes through. She…

I was recently reading a book by Dr. Sherry Walling about psychology and entrepreneurship, and she discusses a spectrum between chaos and rigidity that we all fall on. It struck me that the same spectrum applies to how we feed ourselves. On the rigidity side, imagine someone with firm ideas about what healthy eating looks…

Most real growth is happening where you can’t see it Steve has a retirement plan, and at this stage it consists of six dragon fruit plants in our front yard. (We are both, for what it’s worth, still contributing to our 401Ks.) Dragon fruit takes its time. Every morning when we take the dogs out…