I read recently an article in Men\u2019s Health titled \u201cThese Are the Unwritten Rules That All Guys Follow\u201d that I would like to speak to — yes, I read magazines like \u201cMen\u2019s Health,” \u201cMen\u2019s Journal,” and “Maxim” on my Apple Newsfeed. They provide a welcome counterbalance to the humorless screeds (usually complaining about politics) which blanket the more \u201cserious\u201d publications like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, or Washington Post. Balance. The article listed was based on a Reddit thread that has some 5,700 responses. It summarizes a few of the main \u201cunspoken rules\u201d that men supposedly follow: Do not crowd next to each other when using the urinal in a restroom. No conversation while using public restrooms. (\u201cNo talking at the urinal. Ever.\u201d) Not looking around while peeing or peeking over or under the bathroom stall doors.  If someone buys you a beer, you buy the next beer. Don\u2019t be afraid to kill spiders. Don\u2019t leave a friend hanging when he offers you a \u201chigh five.\u201d It would be hard to argue with these rules, but I would offer a few highly subjective rules for men of my own. Others may feel free to disagree. They are entitled to their opinion, as I am free to have my own. DO NOT GET WEIRD ABOUT FOOD What do I mean about \u201cweird\u201d? This is what I mean: food is the fuel we use to power our bodies and stay alive. It provides the materials necessary for the sustenance of life. Eat mostly healthy food and in moderation; but don\u2019t spend exorbitant amounts of time and energy on food.  To be more specific, avoid the following: No counting calories I have seen many women, and a few men unfortunately, use iPhone apps to count their total caloric intake for the day. The idea is to limit the calories one eats and thereby lose weight. If you strictly monitor what and how much you eat, you can consciously day-by-day and month-by-month lose weight — burn more calories than you take in. This is the theory. Then there is the reality. The problem is that counting calories will require significant time and effort: Planning and then chronicling exactly what one eats and entering the data into your records renders the act of eating into a complicated and stressful ritual. There are strict rules, and a person might leave a meal still hungry. If you \u201ccheat\u201d and go over the calorie limit, feelings of guilt and failure might follow. There is pressure involved in eating. Who needs more pressure in their life? Life does not have to be this complicated. Eat mostly healthy food, and eat until you are full. Then stop eating. Avoid food that is obviously horrible for you, like ice cream or french fries or milk shakes or the like. Eat a bunch of vegetables and rice and some protein, too. If you eat mostly healthy food, everything else should take care of itself. Eat unhealthy food occasionally, and don\u2019t make a big deal out of it. Instead of counting calories and fretting, work out and work out hard. You could try and enter the form of exercise and how many minutes you did it into your iPhone app, and then that would allow you to eat more calories for that day. You could spend all that time and effort in the calorie counting game. But don\u2019t play this game. It isn\u2019t worth it. Instead measure the quantity of totally sweat-drenched and disgustingly smelly clothes you produce after a hard workout. If you are constantly leaving a lot of sweat-soaked clothes in the washing machine, you are getting the calorie burn that you want.  On a hard Sunday morning of tennis, I will soak two sets of clothes. I deposit this \u201cnuclear,\u201d sweaty-smelly laundry into the washing machine right when I get home. After a hard workout I will then eat mostly healthy food until I am full, and then I stop eating. Drink tons of water. Cheat once in awhile and eat something not so healthy. Work out to earn your appetite and food afterward, and then eat to recover from your workout. Don\u2019t overthink it. Don\u2019t make it more complicated than it needs to be. If you do this, you will not be overweight. Or at least not very overweight. As I have gotten older, I have acquired a layer of fat around my waist. Even when I workout intensely over a week or a month, that layer does not go away. I have concluded that this is a function of age and have made my peace with it. Maybe if I starved myself it would go away, but nothing is worth starving yourself for. This layer of fat around my belly probably will get bigger with age, although it hasn’t yet; people almost always get bigger with age, I have noticed. I can\u2019t control this fat I have, but I can control my workouts and eating (mostly) healthily. Control what you can control, and ignore the rest. Life as it is can be overwhelming with all the details clamoring for one\u2019s attention. Why make it more complicated by counting calories and turning mealtimes into stress-filed rituals? Use that energy instead for more positive endeavors — like joining a mountain biking team or scuba diving club, where one will make new friends and burn tons of calories naturally. Attend a live music concert or go dancing. You want to sit there counting the calories in your food instead? Counting calories is an activity most associated with women, and I urge women to stop doing it, too. But if you are a guy and counting your calories, you really want to think about what you are doing and why. How did you get sucked into this damaging dynamic? It might be that people with unusual metabolisms and rare health disorders might need to count calories. I am not a licensed dietician. Your mileage may vary. But this is how I see it. No weighing yourself Weighing yourself and getting a number is similar to counting calories and getting a number. For the same reason, don\u2019t do it. Spend your brain cycles in the effort to hike up your local mountain with friends or win your USTA league with your tennis teammates. Exercise vigorously on almost a daily basis, and then eat mostly healthy food afterwards. That is the winning formula. Don\u2019t weigh yourself. Don\u2019t spend your precious time and energy thinking about a certain number of pounds you should weigh, and don\u2019t plan your activities and your meals around getting down to your \u201cideal weight.\u201d Wake up, do your daily job, afterwards workout until exhaustion, and then eat copiously — then sleep. Repeat. I have not owned a scale for weighing myself since I lived with my parents during high school in the early 1980s. Did I weigh myself last year or the year before that? No, I have not weighed myself in decades. Yes, they weigh me when I go to the doctor\u2019s office, and I sort of pay attention to that number. But I don\u2019t pay much attention. I am sure I have gone up and down a bit in my weight over the years and the decades. I just don\u2019t think that number all that important. I refuse to pay much attention. I will devote my energies to more productive ventures. If my wife or my daughters were to acquire a scale and bring it into our house, I might raise an eyebrow in concern. If they suddenly started weighing themselves daily, I would become alarmed. It might be time to have a conversation on what is really important in life. Why is the number that is your weight so important? What again are the values important to our family? \u201cAre you fat?\u201d might be a less important question than these ones \u2014 \u201cAre you fit?\u201d \u201c Are you strong?\u201d If the answer to those two questions is \u201cyes,\u201d then who cares how much you weigh? And if you are \u201cfit\u201d and \u201cstrong,\u201d you are rarely going to be overweight.  You still might not be skinny, but who cares? If you are not super-skinny like some runway model, it does not mean you are overweight. Be happy with Aristotle\u2019s Golden Mean: moderation in all things. Do not fixate on what you appear to be; focus on what you really are. Reputation is what people think you are; character is what you really are. If you know you are healthy and secure in yourself, your external appearance takes on less importance.  Women most often wrestle with these issues, I know. That is bad enough. But if you are a man and going down this sad road of obsessing over your weight and physical appearance, reconsider your thinking.  No extreme diets I have a cousin who swore by a diet where he ate almost all protein and next to no carbohydrates. It kept him from getting fat, he claimed. He made bacon for me one breakfast, and he said he ate bacon almost morning and steak every evening. He embraced protein; he abjured carbohydrates. He never ate bread, for example. He claimed this regimen kept him slender. I have made no special study of this diet, but it offends my common sense. Eating red meat almost all the time and little else? Maybe this keeps the excess pounds off, but what does it do to your cholesterol count? To the likelihood of developing cardiovascular diseases? Or some other health disorder? And nowadays this same cousin preaches the new doctrine of fasting intermittently, in addition to never eating carbohydrates. I have heard this called the Keto diet, and I have read a little about it. Supposedly the body learns to burn calories more efficiently when you shock it with a 24 hour fasts occasionally. The body learns to burn fat instead of carbs. Or something. As in with counting calories, this process of keto diet seems complicated. But at least when you are counting calories you can eat a balanced diet. My gut tells me there is going to be some future consequences as a result of pursuing extreme diets. All red meat, all the time? Really? And even if this will not one day give you blocked arteries and heart disease, think of all the other things you could be doing with your time and energy. All the books you could read instead of focusing on food. The new languages you could learn. The organizations you could join and people you could meet. Instead you want to wage a religious crusade-like campaign to alter radically your meals, follow an extreme diet, and lose tons of weight? If you are terribly overweight, then maybe such drastic action is necessary. But if you are simply trying to emulate this Instagram celebrity with a \u201cthigh gap\u201d or \u201csix pack abs,\u201d maybe you should think again. Or better yet, take Instagram off your iPhone. No testosterone injections I have a number of peers who give themselves daily testosterone shots, but only one of them has low testosterone levels and was prescribed the drug by a medical doctor. Most take it to attempt to regain the hormone levels they had when they were much younger men. The testosterone shots gives a man in his fifties the muscle building properties and libido of a man of thirty. My own doctor told me there was an \u201cupside\u201d to testosterone shots, and not much of a \u201cdownside.\u201d  I thought about taking testosterone, as I described two and a half years ago when I turned 50. But my gut told me that introducing a hormone into my body for months or years at a time would change my endocrine system. I am getting older, and lower testosterone levels is part of getting older. Why fight aging? I can maintain and build muscle naturally without testosterone, and I am not unhappy with my libido level. Why mess with my endocrine…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3696,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.rjgeib.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/justsayno.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9GRdY-Xt","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rjgeib.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rjgeib.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rjgeib.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rjgeib.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rjgeib.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3687"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.rjgeib.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3687\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7094,"href":"https:\/\/www.rjgeib.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3687\/revisions\/7094"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rjgeib.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3696"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rjgeib.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rjgeib.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rjgeib.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}