News and Statistical Updates On Health and Wellness – Episode Recaps-Part Two-

Self-awareness should be a daily practice - sort of like living in the now, taking stock in your values, and researching the latest information about consciousness and mental health. But here at the Re-Engineered You, we wouldn't presume to live in the now for YOU and taking stock of your values is a YOU thing. But as far as looking into the latest studies, we've got you. So, here's some bonus, brain-stretching facts, updates, and corrections to some of our favorite past episodes. It's our pleasure to bring them to your ears.

Matt Hoover and Weight Loss

Joe: When we talk about sensational studies that make people excited, the one I see come up all the time is they've solved weight loss. If you look up ScienceDaily, there's a new article every week. So, I was wondering if we have an update to our weight loss episode with Matt Hoover.

Todd: You're right. Weight loss is a billion-dollar business, and we did an episode at week 17, Matt Hoover, and he's the man that won The Biggest Loser. Now, Joe and I both had big weight losses in our lives.

Joe: After doing this episode and finding out that every single person who's ever been on The Biggest Loser basically gains their weight back, we eventually concluded that environmental control is the most optimum way to do this.

Todd: These people have amazing transformations. I was a fan of the show and I watched Matt Hoover on it. I even saw him at the gym one day, but I didn't recognize him at first. When I finally realized this was the guy from the show, I noticed he had gained so much weight back. I was almost embarrassed to say hi to him.

Joe: Right? And what we found out in the episode is there's no real shame in that because every season and they studied the contestants’ metabolisms and even hormones and found that if you lose that much weight that quickly, it comes back. And not by choice. I mean, these people have all the incentive in the world to keep it off.

Todd: Yes, they get income from it. If they keep that weight off, they have unlimited opportunities because of all this exposure on national TV.

Joe: I have to point out the spoiler though, which is they found out that there's something called a metabolic offset to where've you lose that much weight that fast, they permanently don't need as many calories as a normal human. One of the contestants was 800 under, meaning that instead of eating 2600 calories a day to stay a normal human being, he was limited to around 1800 to get those same results. One of the biggest losers said it was like having a terminal illness. It means that you don't eat meals anymore and you can't live like a human because your body is just like trying to claw back.

Todd: You can't maintain that. It's unsustainable to keep that kind of diet.

Overall, science shows that you are going to gain it back and that when you do, you have a permanent calorie change. You don't need as many as a normal person. However, the study that they were covering today makes me feel a little bit better. There's a new study out from ScienceDaily. This new study indicates that consistent exercise (not weight loss) contributes to a healthier and longer life. Then the science article says that when it comes to getting healthy and reducing mortality risks, physical activity; improving fitness appear to be superior to weight loss. I remember watching a video of one of the contestant winners who gained all the weight back, but he was still exercising. He was still getting up every morning and walking three miles a day. It makes me feel so much better than doing so is not wasted overall. We're getting the benefit even if they didn't see it in the mirror.

William Sidis and Intelligence

Intelligence and William Sidis was the first episode where I felt like we had nailed all the points. We were brainstorming about how intelligent people seem to be more miserable and make themselves crazy. Joe dug up this story on William, and he had the highest IQ ever – 80 points higher than Albert Einstein. He could read the New York Times when he was two years old. By age six, he learned English, Latin, French, German, Russian, Hebrew, Turkish, and Armenian. By age 11, he entered Harvard and was one of the youngest students in its history.

Now, we wrote some speeches about this and some training about it. Suppose my IQ was a hundred higher than Albert Einstein's, how much wood could I create? What could I think? What can I see that others couldn’t? I would think your income would be limitless, but let's say you probably make 5-6X more than you make now. If you're hyper-intelligent, you're going to accompany the company and point at people's products and say, here's how you can improve this. But that is not how hyper-intelligence or intelligence works.

We went with Mensa's studies on high IQ individuals and that your high IQ only affects your earning potential throughout your lifetime by about 3%. So, if you clip coupons throughout your life, you will catch up to the hyper-intelligent. You're probably also a tortured soul because all these lower IQ people surround you. William lived such a lonely, sad, tortured life for that intelligence. Overall, ScienceDaily came up with a new article that found emotional intelligence is more valuable than IQ.

We also found in the episode social conscientiousness, which falls under emotional intelligence. Basically, it is your awareness of other people, how to be emotionally intelligent with others, and how to be aware of others that affect your earning potential. So, if you're working on something with your kids or on yourself, a better career move is to put your time on emotional intelligence. Somebody with high emotional intelligence can better figure out why somebody is trying to get you emotional and lost their intelligence. When we got into classism, upper classes were taught early on to question things.

Anna Delvey and Classism

This was one of my absolute favorites. She had an interesting article come out about her, and it got a lot of attention that we talked about it in the episode. She was caught grifting and flimflamming the elite on the East Coast. She presented herself as a foreign heiress and passed out of the hundred dollars, which convinced people to let her stay in like Penthouse Hotel and things like that. She was doing it so she could build a high class. She was trying to get a crazy huge loan to open up an art studio and got dangerously close to doing it.

In short, she was able to disguise herself into the upper class, and then she got caught. They ultimately found out she was the daughter of a Russian trucker and was just very good at pretending that money doesn't matter. Well, there was an update on Anna. She got out of prison, and now Netflix is making a drama out of it. The Netflix series is being produced by Shonda Rhimes, and I am looking forward to it.

Linda Riss and Attraction

Linda was a Brooklyn Liz Taylor. She was a gorgeous young woman who fell in love with an attorney named Burt Pugach. But she found out that Burt was married and dumped him. Because of that, he got some goons to throw lye in her face, which burned her skin and blinded her for life. He did prison time because, of course, he was guilty. He said, “If I can't have you, nobody will when I'm done with you.” He ruined her face essentially. Now, once he landed in prison, he started writing her love letters and she started loving him back again. She ended up marrying him, the man that blinded her. This was number 27. It still gets me. It still makes spiders crawling up my back that she would marry him. The subject of this was attraction, and Joe and I are always curious about why a girl likes him and doesn't like me, etc. So, we started digging into the research of it all.

We recently covered another story about a historical Miser, and in that story we talked about why this old creep with a ton of money doesn't just marry a model. We found out in that episode that this type of stereotype is not common. It’s just Hollywood. People's attractions actually match up value to value. If you value physical attractiveness, you'll find someone who's attracted to physical stuff. If you value money, you'll find someone who values money. Most of the time, people will meet what their values are. It's not so much a gold digger and an old rich guy.

There was a newer study that came out by Stephen White of Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane. As of this year, they released this study that surveyed thousands of Australians from dating websites ages 18 to 65. They were asked to rate the importance of nine traits in their mates. These traits were age, attractiveness, physical build/features, intelligence, education, income, trust, openness, and emotional connection. They expected that men would be all about the body and women would be all about intelligence or money. They found out that income was of lower importance than they thought it would be for women. They also rated age, education, intelligence, income, trust, and emotional connections higher than men. So, all of the ones that would indicate somebody's status or power, women rated those 9 to 14 points higher than men. Men assigned higher priority to attractiveness - big shock, right?

However, here's the important part. While men placed higher importance on aesthetics than women, that gap narrowed with age. Younger women placed a higher value on personality, which came closer to men's personality scores with age. So, the age-old stereotype that men want a hot body and women want a powerful man, the truth is that we are looking for the same things in mates. It's just that we're looking for them at different times in our life. According to the study, the most important and attractive quality for both men and women was a sense of humor. We have covered multiple studies about how humor is an attraction hack. We have a couple of episodes where we discussed that being funny is a social trick. It indicates that you are intelligent, self-aware, and understand your audience. I'll go as far as to say that it'll work longer in your life than being gorgeous.

Troy Hurtubise and Creative Obsession

Joe: Do you remember the episode where we talked about the dude that built grizzly bear armor?

Todd: Oh, yeah, that crazy Canadian inventor Troy. This guy is freaking nuts.

Joe: When I first saw his armor on TV, I didn't think that it took so much ingenuity. I was just like, oh, that looks like it's made from duct tape and car parts.

Todd: This episode was born from the concept that to get anything in life, especially creative things, you must get a bit crazy. You must get obsessed.

Joe: Yes, Todd and I both suffer from a high degree of obsession whenever we start a passion project. You need a layer of obsession to get really into something enough to carry through.

It doesn't matter what your obsession is as long as you have it and you can channel it. Now, I found a really neat study that crosses cultural boundaries with obsession. This is an update to episode 30 emphasis on the obsession part and comes out of The Department of Psychology at Stanford and the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They looked at three large-scale data sets of adolescents from 59 societies from across the globe. When we look at obsession, we usually look at passion obsession and obsessive compulsiveness in our culture. We look at Americans and more how obsessed we are with the things we get into. That is exactly what we are trying to find in episode 30. Does your obsession lead to achievement such as money awards? In these individualistic societies, they found that Americans’ passion better predicts achievement.

This study found that yes, in individualistic societies, passion is a predictor for achievement, but in collectivistic societies, it is less powerful than if their parent's support said achievements. That means that if you do not grow up with someone who invents his way to the American dream, it could hinder your narrative. We all come together to build and if you grew up with having parents who were passionate about you and supported you, that is equal to you having passion as a predictor. This is also that why this country has had more than its share of over-the-top world-changing inventions.

Didier Lombard and Differentiating Meanness and Toughness

We did this episode on Didier Lombard and the major telecommunications company named France Telecom. Here, we talked about the difference between being tough and being mean. We want to teach ourselves to be tougher, but when do we cross that line and become mean? In that episode, we discovered that psychology has a pretty well-defined line for that. It's When you are using power for the sake of using power, that's when you're mean and not productively tough. We also talked about France Telecom, a French company whose CEO mandated that their managers be as mean as possible to make people quit because they were government-protected employees who couldn't be fired. So, France Telecom made them so uncomfortable and pushed so hard to where people started quitting and even committing suicide.

I investigated this episode from time to time just to see how the case was going and see if there was any updated news about meanness and bullying. And what I found was a new study this past year talking about organic bullying and school. When I think of a bully in school, I have the wrong conception. I used to think that bullying and harassment in school came from a bully with crappy home life. The real reason is they have low self-esteem and are trying to bolster it by putting others down. They're coming from a place of vulnerability. However, according to the study, bullying more often occurs when someone is climbing social hierarchy.

They studied teens in North Carolina over the course of a year and found out that friends in the fall were more than three times as likely to bully or victimized each other in the spring that same school year. They are trying to move to the social class, which makes sense that bullying usually happens between friends. Bullying happens when somebody is trying to get more popular, and the people around him don't like it. Teens who bully their peers are not always lashing out in reaction to psychological problems or unhealthy home environments but often use aggression strategically to climb their school social hierarchy. These findings point to why most anti-bullying programs don't work and suggest possible strategies for the future.

Orson Welles and First Impressions

In our first impressions episode, we covered all about its importance and your chances of success after blowing a first impression. And the narrative we did is a hilarious story about when first time Orson Welles actor from Citizen Kane met with the greatest writer of all time Ernest Hemingway. They ended up getting into a fistfight in a dark projector room.

Orson Welles was cracking jokes about how badly written the screening was, and Hemingway (who wrote it) was sitting in the front row in the dark. So, Hemingway stood up, and they picked up chairs, and almost went to full brawl in the middle of a dark room. But before that happened, somebody clicked on the lights, and they realized who each other was started laughing. I suggest listening to that episode. It takes you through both of their lives, how they kind of mirrored one another, and how they really were friends but enemies the whole time.

To give you an update here, there's going to be a debut of the 80th anniversary of a long loss Orson Welles cut of called The Magnificent Ambersons, and it was his follow-up to Citizen Kane. Welles originally previewed this film and then it was destroyed and cut 43 minutes out, including the ending. It had all approvals but not from the final director and the original footage was melted down for use in World War II. So back then, the greatest film ever made with one of the greatest directors gets cut, and the parts are melted down and sent off as nitrate for World War II.

Todd: So, we're talking about making good Impressions and bad impressions, right? First impressions are everything. When you meet someone, do you usually make a good impression or a bad one?

Joe: Oh boy. It depends on how caffeinated I am. I when I make first impressions, I try to do it one of two ways. I either try to use a lot of humor or help them as much as possible. I screw up both often, though and walk away assuming I flubbed and it like Hemingway and Orson Welles. I assume they're going to hate me for the rest of my life. After you meet me, off in the distance you'll hear this very quiet sound. And that's the sound of me clutching my gut, knowing that I screwed up my impression.

Todd: You are in good company. A vast majority of everybody has what is called the 'liking gap.' Most people feel like they left a terrible first impression. Part of it is our expectations, not measuring up as we wanted them. But one way to know if you made a good impression is if the person you are talking to leans in towards you. If they do this, you likely made a good impression, and they probably would like to see you again, even if they didn't give you any real obvious signs.

Joe: People are predisposed to wanting to work with you, even if you make a bad first impression.

Todd: We hate studies with college kids, but this is a college kid study where they took groups and had him introduce each other for the first time. Afterward, they asked the students what they thought the other person thought of them and if they would like to see them again. Most people said, no, I don't think they like me. I don't think I'd ever want to see me again. But funny enough, everybody was wrong.

Joe: When you make a first impression, are you burning so many mental calories trying to keep track of what you're saying, the humor you're using, and feedback that you can't notice the positive signs?

Todd: Yes, and that's what human nature is. We are all so busy worrying about our performance that we're not paying attention to what they say.