Well, I started with the guided walking meditation in the app I use (Waking Up). It has 3 pre-recorded coaching sessions for walking. I did the longest one which is for walking outside in public.
I wished it had more, but it only had that one. So I bought this other app, called “Walking Meditations” (on iOS), and it basically just has 3 guided walking meditation sessions.
I also have “Ten Percent Happier” so I did that app’s walking meditation.
After trying all these guided walking meditations a couple times each, I started trying to do it on my own, without any guidance/coaching.
That works, but I personally still do better with a guided session. (That is to say, when I have an audio guide, I tend to notice more quickly when I get lost in thought, and observe the thought and let it pass, then return focus to the object of meditation, whether that is my breath, body sensations, environmental sounds, etc. If left to my won devices, after a while I still tend to get lost in thought for several minutes before realizing it.)
So then I realized, hey, I can do the regular guided meditations while walking. The guide does usually say something like “OK, take your seat. Close your eyes, and bring your attention to the sounds around you | your breath | the weight of your body in space.” I just ignore the non-applicable parts, or substitute something applicable.
If walking outside, I don’t close my eyes. Instead of bringing my awareness to the feeling of my body in the chair, I bring it to the feeling of my feet hitting the pavement, my legs supporting my body.
But the rest of the coached meditation generally works fine. The commentary in these sessions generally consists of long pauses with gentle reminders and hints, to softly note your in/out breaths, become aware of sounds or sensations, or note when you become lost in thought and return your focus to the object of meditation.
I believe with more practice I will likely just do it without coaching, but for now I like it with the coaching. I also made a habit of doing morning meditations standing on my roof, eyes shut usually, but facing the sun. That works great, too.
Especially great for walking are the guided meditations that have you pay close attention to all the sounds around you. In a city, or in nature, even in a stil and quiet place.
TL;DR - “just do the same meditation, but while walking”
I started IF about two years ago. I gradually, over a very long period worked down to one meal a day. It wasn’t hard, because it was gradual. I didn’t lose weight (but I wasn’t overweight to begin with), but I have leaner stomach and I gained muscle and strength. I’ve never felt better in my life. The first improvement I noticed was mental clarity.
It is embarrassing that the BBC article gets all its information from only one “expert”, who doesn’t seem expert at all. So shallow. For me, the best source of solid evidence-based information about IF was Jason Fung’s Obesity Code.
While not seriously overweight I had maybe an extra 10-15 pounds last year. Started just eating breakfast, a really fatty breakfast with bacon, ham, eggs, lard tortillas (they are the best) and salsa. Maybe 1500+ calories, I don't know.
Then I simply wasn't hungry the rest of the day. The intermittent fasts were seldom pure, I might have a few crackers or fruit or something if hungry and would occasionally eat a light lunch or supper as the occasion demanded.
Lost the extra weight in like 2 months. Jeans fit well again and belt was back to the first hole. I didn't do any extra exercise, just the usual walks and yard work. It was no kind of suffering or struggle at all so I've been mostly sticking with it.
It's also nice to only worry about essentially one meal a day.
It's pretty easy to do if you work your way up to it, if you eat normal it would make you sick at first but you would adjust quicker than you'd tbink. It's not really even unusual anymore, a lot of people eat that much for every meal.
Just slowly eat more and more food to expand the size of your stomach, not really a trick to it or anything. I've heard the professional hot dog eaters drink large amounts of water with large meals to expand their stomachs though if you want to get there fast I guess. An actual step by step would probably just doing two 1k meals then shifting over 200 calories at a time if you are still feeling bloated.
I am a scientist and I have to read sometimes hundreds of pages of dense scientific literature in a given week while doing other things that my job requires. I also find reading long difficult text to be hard. However, over the years I found two things that allowed me to get better at it:
1. Just read A LOT. There is no way around it. If you push yourself to do this, eventually your mind will figure out a way.
2. Markup the text you are reading. I do this on an iPad with a stylus. I underline key points, circle important paragraphs, jot down a quick summary of lengthy thoughts.
>1. Just read A LOT. There is no way around it. If you push yourself to do this, eventually your mind will figure out a way.
Part of what slows people down reading scientific papers is akin to that person's absorptive capacity. When you start reading something, you come in with a host of prior knowledge: terms, phrases, principles, etc that you know and understand. The more of these things you have when reading relevant to the piece you're reading, the more quickly you can read, digest, critize, etc.
I've read this particular GFS paper a long time ago and this is a domain I can read through fairly rapidly (pro tip: read the abstract and conclusions first to make sure it's worth your time to read the meat of the paper given academic incentives to publish anything anymore).
I've worked with some medical professionals doing work on partial arthroplasty related techniques (adding 3D volume reconstructive techniques) and the paper took me forever to get through and contribute to because like you, every paragraph was me looking up medical terminology and trying to incorporate that into my baseline knowledge. My absorptive capacity was very low in that context.
In general, the more generalized scientific knowledge you have, the easier it is to pickup and read these papers quickly (if they've been written for a general scientific audience). If they're CS papers, clearly CS foundations help (theory, nomenclature, current and past popular trends, etc.).
Full agree on both points. I’d also add that if the papers are in any true experimental science field, a baseline understanding of probability and statistics will be necessary for the reader to really understand the results. For CS or theory papers, generally that is less or not necessary.
I doubt it. Using O_DIRECT is essentially bypassing the buffer cache. Similar to the “cold” experiments where the file is not cached. Mmap is still faster. I have also done experiments on a NVRAM machine with DAX file system (no buffer cache). Mmap is still several times faster.
It is skipping the buffer cache that is true, but, if I understand things correctly, it allows kernel to use user provided buffers directly, thus skipping the copying of the data from kernel to user land. That is why buffers used in O_DIRECT context have to be aligned properly.
It would be fun to run the experiment non the less.
From open(2) man pages on O_DIRECT:
Try to minimize cache effects of the I/O to and from this
file. In general this will degrade performance, but it is
useful in special situations, such as when applications do
their own caching. File I/O is done directly to/from user-
space buffers
