Cristian Vlad Zot's Blog, page 12

Perturbations in my Lifestyle – Letting go of Limiting Beliefs [A Journal]

Introduction I’ve been away from home for a month or so. As I left, I decided to alter several of my lifestyle factors to test which of them hold true. I want to be more flexible; I want to have more degrees of freedom and I want to steer clear from rigid strategies and fixated

The Priming Effect – Your Thoughts, Friends, Environment = Future You

Introduction With my head stuck into Thinking Fast and Slow, the voluminous book by Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman, I started becoming more familiar with the field of behavioral economics. Kahneman discusses extensively about cognitive biases and automatic (unconscious) mechanisms that drive human behavior (unconscious to you and me of course – unless you are actively

The Ketotic Brain compared to the Glycolitic Brain [Studies and Anecdotes]

Introduction I’ve briefly touched the subject of ketotic brain metabolism in some of my past posts. I’d say there’s much more to this subject than what I wrote before. Here I will discuss additional research findings along with a few personal experiences (anecdotes). My focus is on GABA and glutamate mediated effects. I’ll begin with

How to Manipulate Statistics in Research – A Short Guide to Bad Science

Introduction Today I’m not gonna teach you how to deceive. But, I’m gonna show you how statistics can be deployed for wrongdoing. In particular, I’m going to discuss a few methods that are often applied to research studies so that desired results are more easily attained. The untrained eye (at least 90% of us) is

My Belly Fat Progression by DXA – [2013 – 2016]

Those of you close to me are familiar with the details of my fat loss experiment, which I underwent between ~October and December 2013. For those who don’t know, I posted the details here. To increase the accuracy of my approach I used a DEXA scanner. I wanted to measure the progression of my body

Step-wise Approach to Improve your Thinking Skills – 7 Books

Most of us assume we are reason-driven creatures; we assume we hold the power to each and every decision we make; we assume we are highly cognitive. I know I lived my life with these automatic assumptions until not so long ago. But as I learned more about the way our brain works physiologically and

What I’ve Been Reading Recently – My Bookshelf #9

Intro I read 39 books in 2016 (as of April). I’m ahead of my last year’s count (this time, last year). I don’t do speed reading. I try to read slowly. I enjoy it. It’s not a hobby. It’s something I do everyday for a substantial amount of my time. Most of the books I

Energy Metabolism in the Fasted State – [Cahill’s Research]

Prolonged fasting has received a lot of attention from the scientific community, historically speaking. And it’s still on the radar today because it may elicit powerful positive effects in many subjects (not for everyone). The sad part is that it fails to become popular as a practice possible because there are little ‘stakes’ (skin in

15 Compounds with Effect on Lifespan

A crowd-funded project on the topic of longevity was successfully funded on June 16, 2015. The scope of the project was to create a longevity cookbook. They raised $57,770. In March 2016, the team published the first chapter of the book for free. It details a list of compounds that have been research and could

My Blood Work #4 – March 2016 – [Variations]

Introduction The last time I posted about my blood work was in Nov. 2015. Here is my March 2016 update: And here’s a comparison with past data: Context and Analysis There are a few things that I want to discuss. First, I don’t like to see my fasting blood glucose levels at 88 mg/dL, even