SB 183: Fitness pedantry, G-doc hacks, tragedy at MSU
Hi, I’m Matt. Welcome to Steady Beats: a newsletter about building the middle-aged life you want in small and steady beats.
Fitness Beats
Let’s fight pedantry on Fitness Twitter.
It’s rife with virtual signaling and food and fitness routine evangelism. The most rigid ideas often gain the most most signal. Someone new that scene could quickly determine good health requires perfect habits and ironclad discipline.
You don’t need to be perfect to be well.
For example: satiation — feeling full — is a big Twitter topic. Many claim they feel perfectly full eating no carbs. So you end up with “meal” photos of things like ground bison seasoned with sugarless ketchup accompanied by claims like “delicious and satiating.”
Is that how you would describe bison and sugarless ketchup? Me neither.
The same is true of the vegan movement, which often espouses the satiation of meals are that barely more than water.
When it comes to satiation, listen to your own body. I never feel full eating only low carb. I also never feel feel eating only carbs. For me, it takes a blend. And it might for you, also.
So let’s not get pedantic. Let’s not try to be perfect. Just use common sense, over and over and over again, and you’ll be ahead of 95% of the population when it comes to feeling and looking good.
Productivity Beats
If you spend a lot of time in Google Docs, here are couple of my favorite tips to make it easier to use.
Go Pageless
Go to File > Page Setup and then select the “Pageless” button at the top of the pop-up. You’ll gain endless fields of white, and can extend tables horizontally further than a prairie purview. There’s no reason to have an 8.5” x 11” view if you’re not printing.
And speaking of tables …
Turn lists into tables
If you have a list of items you want to copy and paste into a table in individual rows, here’s how:
Create your table in your Google Doc.
Paste your list of items into a Google Sheet and then copy the list.
Paste the list from the Google Sheet into the first cell of the table. The list will distribute down into individual rows.
What Gun Violence Steals
The latest mass shooting in America arrived Monday night at the campus of my alma mater, Michigan State University.
(No politics from me here. Both American political parties have failed us massively in different ways.)
This piece in The Atlantic, written by alumnus Tim Alberta, beautifully states what the school means to so many of us:
Most products of the youthful imagination are eventually rejected, cruelly and unceremoniously, by the realities of maturation. But every dream that came to my child’s mind when conceiving of college—the stately buildings and the sprawling green spaces, the roaring football stadium and the whispering river, the camaraderie and the conviviality and the bottomless school spirit—was a reality at Michigan State.
Phrases like “Spartan Strong” and “Spartans Will,” while well-intentioned, ring hollow to me in the face of this horror. Life has been lost forever. And the demonic murderer’s impact goes far further, obliterating trust and peace for so many others.
Unbelievably sad, but all too real. Words fail me.
Thank you for reading.
Let’s keep the Steady Beats going. 💚
💯 for replacing diet pedantry with common sense. The challenge is what kind of information informs one’s common sense!
I have so many friends who are Spartan parents that I was frozen, waiting for them to hear from their child. If my life was disrupted, however slightly, from afar, the impact of being on campus during the attack is incalculable.