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US News & World Report's Katherine Hobson summarizes some of the ideas in a book called The Complete Beck Diet for Life , by Judith Beck. These ideas are surprisingly, well, Spartan. Much of the advice falls into the overarching Spartan Diet attitude of: suck it up and stop being such a wimp. For example, the ideas that 1) hunger is bad; 2) overeating when emotional is good; and 3) taking a break from healthy eating is OK are also explored and discredited in the Spartan Diet . Other notions we disagree with. For example, the list of unhealthy attitudes includes the idea that some foods should be permanently avoided. We agree with that "bad attitude." If you want optimum health, you should never, ever eat fried foods, processed foods, domesticated animal meats, mayonnaise, sugar and a long list of other foods. We say, suck it up, Judith Beck, and stop being such a wimp. Banning bad foods is a great idea. Best of all, according to Hobson, Beck totally nails the reason...

A fitness site called Straight to the Bar posted six reasons why exercising outdoors, rather than indoors, is is a good idea -- especially in winter. The reasons: 1. Mental stimulation 2. Avoidance of negative effect of working out on perfectly flat surfaces 3. Benefit from coping with uneven surfaces 4. Boost to immune system 5. Protection against injury due to cold weather 6. Psychological benefit that goes with physiological benefit We agree with these points, and would like to add four more: 7. Sunshine is vital for optimum health, especially in winter 8. Exercising outdoors, especially in harsh weather, builds mental toughness 9. Fresh air is good for you 10. Constantly focusing near, then far, improves eyesight What do all these points have in common? In general, the human body benefits from challenge. It grows stronger when confronted with obstacles, inconveniences, extremities. So get out there and exercise, every day!

Barry Popkin's book about the global obesity epidemic, called " The World Is Fat ," contains a lot of detail about why so many are so overweight. US News' Katherine Hobson wrote up a list of facts from the book, including: * The average American gets 400 calories a day from beverages. (Note: Spartan Dieters get 0 calories per day from beverages.) * The American Dietetic Association says that getting up to 25 percent of your daily calories from sugar is OK. (Most of the ADA's recommendations are a joke -- this one included.) * You're not crazy. Clothing makers are changing the numbers they slap on sizes. What used to be a woman's 8 is now a 6, for example. (Clothing makers are profiting from acting as enablers for the denial of shoppers as they gain weight.)

A New Zealand researcher at Auckland Regional Public Health Service has found that "heavily processed" carbohydrates -- such as white bread, white pasta and anything with sugar in it -- are physically addictive like cigarettes and cocaine . These foods produce a "rush of sugar" in the body, which "stimulates the same areas of the brain that are involved with addiction to nicotine and other drugs." The New Zealand research parallels a study (reported on this blog in December) that found sugar as addictive as heroin or cocaine . His findings were published in the journal Medical Hypotheses. The Spartan Diet has zero processed foods of any kind, including processed carbohydrates, and zero sugar and therefore totally breaks the cycle of addiction and craving common to most people who eat processed foods.

Scientists at the University of Minnesota have found that vegetables fertilized with the manure of livestock absorb the antibiotics fed to the animals and pass those antibiotics along to the people who eat the vegetables . Approximately 70 percent of all antibiotics produced in the US are fed to cows, pigs and chickens, totaling 25 million pounds of antibiotics per year. About 90 percent of the antibiotics given is passed in the form of waste. The manure of those animals is used to fertilize crops and the crops are passing them along to humans. Of course, people ingest antibiotics from eating livestock animal meat as well. Scientists have previously found a link between child-consumption of antibiotics and allergies and asthma, which have risen dramatically over the years. The Spartan Diet bans all domesticated animal meat (wild fish and game is OK), and calls for wild or organic produce, which is far less likely to contain antibiotics from livestock fertilizer.

A small group of committed people in Oxfordshire, UK, are rebelling against industrial bread and founding a movement to re-introduce real bread back into the human diet . The group, called the Real Bread Campaign , includes bakers, biologists, growers, consumers and Andrew Whitely, founder of a local bakery and author of the book "Bread Matters ." The group advocates the rejection of industrial bread -- the kind you buy in the supermarket -- which uses mono-culture, genetically modified grain grown with chemical fertilizers, herbicides and fungicides and is baked with synthetic chemicals, softeners, preservatives and other unhealthy ingredients. Instead, the group calls for the home-baking or local purchase of long-ferment bread made from ancient, locally grown grain using traditional growing methods (150 to 200 types of wheat in one field, compared with a single variety grown in industrial fields). The Spartan Diet applauds this movement, and looks forward to visiting parti...

What's "whole grain" and what isn't? Is "wheat bread" the same as "whole wheat bread"? What are ancient grains? A New Hampshire publication called Feast , which is a supplement to the Telegraph newspaper, published a nice piece on grains that clears up many common misconceptions . To summarize the two main points: * Ancient grains are those that have not been modified (or have been less modified) by modern agricultural techniques of selective breeding and genetic modification. The article lists amaranth, millet, quinoa, spelt, kamut, sorghum, teff, faro and einkorn. * "Whole grain" does not mean that grains are whole and intact. It means that all elements of the grain are present in the same proportion as found in the intact grain. Flours, breads, pastas and other foods that are not whole grain contain just some parts of the grain, not the whole thing. The Spartan Diet calls for the embrace of ancient grains in part because they tend to...

A recent study by the German Association of Sports Medicine and Prevention found that people can add 10 years to their lives by maintaining weight, avoiding meat and eating a variety of fruits, vegetables and grains . They hint at the superiority of the Mediterranean diet. They also recommend not smoking. All this is pretty obvious and vague advice. The only potentially ground-breaking conclusion the study appears to have arrived at is that the "variety of foods consumed is just as important as the volume in relation to a person's weight." In other words, they found (as many other recent studies have also found) that weight is not a simple calculation around calories consumed. It's the quality of those calories that counts. We would have liked to see the study take their research further, and measure high quality foods (organic, raw, whole) instead of simply focusing on food categories (fruits and vegetables). One way to look at the Spartan Diet is to view it as a ver...