After much deliberation, and some having broken the site with server switching. I’m rebuilding the site. Things will be changing drastically over the next few months.

Please contact me if you have any questions.

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While a monolithic fountain of youth may never come to pass, I wouldn’t be in this line of business if I actually thought that humanity was incapable of overcoming the deadly and terrible problems of aging.  Instead, it’s my suspicion that humans will come to find that “aging” as we think of it today is really a conglomerate of natural and un-natural processes acting against healthy bodily function… in other words, what we refer to as “aging” turns out to be a many headed beast.

Most of us can agree that sugary foods are delicious.  I’ll be the first to tell you that I particularly enjoy the two sodas Big Red and Ale-8-1 (it’s a Kentucky thing probably).  Perhaps you remember my previous discussion of the large-cola breakfast regime that first encouraged me to buy bigger clothes, then led me to develop the first Longbar recipe.  And while I can almost always enjoy a good sweet snack, it’s rewarding to know that my conviction to generally avoid sweets and eat healthier is supported by the findings of researchers.

Physorg.com has an interesting report on the findings of scientists from the University of Alabama Center for Aging and Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.  They studied normal and precancerous human lung cells. Over a few weeks, the cells were grown in an environment with normal or reduced levels of glucose. According to the article, the researchers have discovered a connection between calorie reduction and extended lifespan of normal human cells.  Their findings indicate that between the two groups, normal cells given less glucose were able to live longer and many of the precancerous cells died off as compared to cells which were given normal amounts of glucose.  They also found that lower glucose had beneficial results for telomerase levels.  Telomerase is an enzyme related to aging, that affects a cell’s ability to divide and replace itself.

That’s a far cry from being able to definitively state that decreasing sugar intake will extend human life.  Be that as it may, I’m willing to avoid sugars for more immediate health benefits… specifically being able to fit in to my clothes comfortably.

Perhaps you’re already familiar with some of the troubles ascribed to sugar consumption already, perhaps not.  Many of our customers will not be surprised by what I’m about to suggest, but it seems very important to state it anyway:

The fountain of youth will not be a soda-fountain

Already, a number of well funded research groups (ex: Methuselah Foundation, SENS Foundation) are suggesting aging is just the sort of beast I mentioned above; a culmination of systemic biological and environmental factors resulting in the diseases people die from.

Nobody seems to be born with an expiration date.  Instead, we all have to make decisions about what we are willing to do to stay healthy as long as we can.  Perhaps someday there will be a cure for aging.

Until then, we’ll have to rely on our wits.  That’s where Longbars come in…

Longbars were formulated to be very low in sugar.  There are increasingly more bits of information suggesting that sugar and excess calories generally impact health negatively over the long term.  That’s part of the reason why I decided to formulate Longbars as they’re currently made.  When I encourage the people I know and care about to support their health, I always suggest that they avoid sugary foods… and most of the time I suggest a Longbar for them.

Longbars are great.  Try one today for free, we just ask you to help pay the shipping.  Or you could order a box to keep in your desk at work.  Or perhaps you already love them, and want send one to somebody you would like to have around in your old age.  Whatever your reason, thanks to our wonderful customers for their support.  We do this for you.

And as always, you can contact the owners directly if you have any questions.

You might be surprised to hear us say it, but the truth is: not everybody needs a Longbar.  And that’s okay because I also realize that a whole lot of people do need a Longbar in their diet (even if they don’t know it yet).

Below is a list of reasons that you might want to get a stack of Longbars for yourself.

You might need a Longbar in your diet if:

Or if you just want to…

Want to find out more about what’s in a Longbar?  Check out the Recipe page.

Want to try a Longbar for yourself? You can order a sample at our Store.

So let’s see, so far I have breezed through childhood, college, grad school and my “professional” career so far.  If you don’t remember you can stroll down memory lane here:   My journey to this point.

Dave has talked a bit about his early days as an entrepreneur and dissatisfaction with the real world (To be an entrepreneur), so I figured I better catch up.

I’m not going to bore you with all the details of my career, but let me start by saying that what motivated me to do what I was “supposed” to do (read:  go to school, get a good degree, get a good job) was the basic belief that the working world is a meritocracy.  I believed that skill and ability were valued, acknowledged and rewarded.  Looking back I have no idea why I believed this.  Naiveté.

I now realize that although I have demonstrated my abilities, they are only valuable to my immediate supervisor.  He relies on me to figure things out.  However, the decision makers have no clue what my competence level is.  I am X, I do Y for a price of Z.  I can be replaced with any number of comparable units.

Truthfully, I expected too much.  I’m under no delusions that I can alter the corporate world.  So I have an important choice:  take it or leave it.

I have a friend who has carved out a nice life for himself as a medical device entrepreneur.  He has been a great source of inspiration and also provides a great dose of reality.  It is certainly not the easiest path, but in the end, it comes down to where you fit as a person.  When discussing my frustration with the job world, he mentioned that he is always paid exactly what he is worth.

Bingo!  A real meritocracy.  Or at least as close as we get.  In truth, random events and many things outside of our control affect our destinies much more than we’d like to admit.  Some people just get lucky or jinxed no matter how you slice it.

So far it sounds like I’m obsessed with pay.  It’s a bit complicated because I really assign almost no value to money itself.  However, I became incredibly disgruntled because I constantly had to figure out how to do things for a colleague who made 2x what I make.  It just didn’t seem fair.  It wasn’t fair.  My own boss admits that.  He also admits he is powerless to do much about it in the short term.  This is just not a scene I want to get sucked into.  People sell away their life.  In the ideal world they would reward me comparably to my colleague.  In the real world the colleague gets laid off and I stay the same.

I choose not to be a unit.  I choose to be my own brand.

Dave and I hope to create some sort of value for you.  I plan to provide a lot of free content related to our product and nutrition in general.  I hope you will find it useful and join in a discussion about how to live a healthier happier life whether you choose to buy any of our products or not.

If we succeed, we will be rewarded financially.   If we don’t, we will still be rewarded with a great learning experience.  It’s that simple and I love it.

Went to a party this past weekend.  This was the sort of party that I don’t typically frequent… e.g. there were productive members of society there.  All of them seemed fairly interested in the idea behind Longbars, and I was glad to make some new connections.

Unfortunately, I didn’t bring any business cards. You’d think that Longbars.com is easy enough to remember, but I still felt like a fool for not having cards.

Thanks to everybody there for the good ideas and encouragement.  Also, special thanks to Lanie (& her folks) for hooking up the bagpipes… good job there.

Perhaps it goes without saying…

that healthy living is harder than not.

Today we have all sorts of choices to make about what we eat, how frequently to eat, where to eat, etc… And for the most part, I think, people don’t understand which dietary choices they need to make to live healthy lives.

What most people don’t understand is the old hand-me-down from gradeschool…

YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT

Fundamentally, when you digest food, your body breaks down whatever it is you’ve eaten and reconfigures those particles into new cells. Seems easy right?

Well, until recently it has been easy to remain healthy by eating just what’s put in front of you. For a long time, food has been produced through traditional agricultural means. For a long time, humans have invested a lot of their time and money into acquiring sustinance.

All that has changed though. With the advent of industrial farming techniques, humans in the civilized world have discovered an unlimited supply of calories for relatively low out-of-pocket cost.

Unfortunately, that low-cost high-output model of production has transformed our human culture faster than our human bodies could adjust. Now that people have abundant food, they seem to absorb more and more of it.

IMMORTALITY WON’T BE FREE

Immortality will take a long time to realize, both scientifically – thru research and understanding of biology – and individually - it will take humanity a long time to adjust to the changes that longevity science brings to society. What’s certain though is that nobody can say for certain when longevity science will become the explosive industry transhumanists are looking for.

Until treatments come to exist which will let us avoid aging, it’s important that anybody who wants to be around to see a transhuman world is acting like it today – by eating right and staying healthy.

Consider this:

• Longbars are formulated to provide the protein and vitamin content of a square meal in a low calorie / low sugar snack. If you sit at a desk all day, then a Longbar is the perfect food to keep you alert and focused without loading your blood and body full of sugars that can negatively impact your health.
• Longbars are designed to help prevent unhealthy consumption. The bar is small and easy to eat, but you’ll find that each one is very filling and full of nutrients and protein that your body needs.
• Longbars are developed by our customers. If you have a question or comment or would like to see an ingredient added… all you have to do is ask.

Please consider supporting Longbars by trying a free sample or even ordering a box to share with people you know.

You can order Longbars in our shop!

Just added a new wordpress plugin to the roster.  You can see the links that Sexy Bookmarks leaves underneath posts on the site.

Here’s a link to their site: http://sexybookmarks.net/

I haven’t yet sent a donation, but don’t let that discourage you.

You’re probably not hearing this for the first time…

A tendency to get distracted can be a real impediment to progress. Staying on task is hard stuff, especially if you’re self-employed. Over the past several months this factoid has made itself very apparent.  So here’s a list of a few things that I’m doing to try to overcome my tendency towards distraction.

1. Clear space to work

I’ve mentioned before that I seem to have inherrited a bad case of ADD. Perhaps it’s environmental. Perhaps it’s genetic. More than likely, it’s a combination of the two.

The bottom line is:  without a clean place to work  it’s tremendously difficult to get up the activation energy to do anything. That’s not to suggest that my office is clutter free. Quite the opposite, in fact. Rather than distracting myself with cleaning my entire workspace, I’ve made a bunch of piles of things to manage later.

2. Music

If years of procrastination has taught me anything, it’s that I’m highly succeptible to distraction. Some people can work with a television in the background. That’s a solution that is completely ineffective in my case. Ask anybody who knows me and they’ll tell you I can’t be in the same room as a television without watching it. Maybe it’s a result of spending my childhood in front of tv’s, maybe it’s something else.

Can’t remember where I learned the trick, but I once heard that music can be a good method to tone down the ADD in kids. As a high-school student I tried classical music… once. The end result was me and Aaron banging our pencils on the desk and humming Flight of the Bumblebee as loud as we possibly could.  Needless to say, we didn’t get a lot done. Ergo, classical music wasn’t a very good way to keep me focused.

Since classical music didn’t work for me, I started listening to something with a bit more verve. I’ve found that faster paced music helps tone down my tendency to get up and wander around the house looking for something more enjoyable.

3. Easy to use tools

As I’ve mentioned in the past, all the tools that I use are free, primarily open-source, software. Since the tools are free, it’s easy to get caught up trying to find the ‘perfect’ solution to my needs. Whether I’m writing posts or trying to consolidate my thoughts, I’ve found that using simple writing tools are typically the most conducive to productivity.

Using a simple writing tool like Tomboy Notes allows me to stay focused on getting thoughts out of my head, rather than becoming distracted by all the bells-and-whistles of a more complicated writing tool. Also, Tomboy’s search and notebook organization tools have made a nice augmentation to my methods. The search feature lets me search through everything I’ve written for specific terms.

4. Keeping track of my time

Time management has never been my strongsuit. As such, maintaining a schedule has always scared the hell out of me. I know that in order to be successful I’ll eventually need to set myself a schedule and take the necessary steps to stick to it. In the meantime though, I’ve started keeping track of how my time gets spent. Rather than setting my schedule in advance, I simply write down each thing that I do on a notebook that I keep on my desk.

Each day, I start a new page and list the events of the day as they happen. Yesterday for instance, my day started with “1140 — Head to Coffee”, followed by “1300 — Install Freemind mindmapping software”. It’s easy for me to look back and see what I accomplished (or didn’t accomplish in some cases) throughout the day. On each page, I’ve also got a column that I write tasks which come to mind.

Writing my ‘Todo’ column allows me to stay focused on the task i’m doing, without feeling like I’ll forget whatever thought popped into my head to distract me in the first place. For instance, I just wrote down “Todo Column Explanation” in my notebook. This little note will remind me that I can write about how the Todo Column works in a different post, but I don’t have to write that post now. My goodness, what an effective method for staying on task!!!

5. Self discipline

Perhaps it goes without saying, but in order to stay on task it’s terrifically important for me to recognize the longterm benefits of doing actual “work”. Without some amount of self discipline it’s just not possible to get anything meaningful accomplished. The constant battle to focus on the task at hand is never helped by my wandering mind. In order to stay focused, I constantly remind myself why I’m doing whatever it is that I’m doing. Whether it’s writing this post or researching other topics to write about, if I don’t keep my goals in mind I’ll end up wasting the most productive part of a caffeine buzz on wikipedia or Google News.

Going back to my fourth point, remembering to write down each thing that I focus my attention on helps to remind me when I get off task. It seems simple enough to keep track of my time, but when I fall off the wagon it’s really easy for me to burn through four or five productive hours of a day. Just the small amount of self discipline required to log my day is enough to make a big difference in my productivity. Self discipline in other areas of my life doesn’t seem to hurt either.

What tools do you use to maintain focus at work or at home? If you’d like to share them, I’d be excited to learn about how they help you.

This is the beginning of the 5th month of Longbars. At the beginning of September we filed the “Articles of Organization” for Newtrition, LLC with the Arizona Corporation Commission.  Just before Thanksgiving the ACC sent notice that the Newtrition, LLC entity had ‘been approved’ (whatever that means).  Next step after filing with the Arizona Corporation Commission was to publish a “Notice of filing”.

Filing the notice was pretty simple.  With the notice that was sent back by the ACC was also a listing of newspapers in which we could publish.  For just $37.00 and a short phone call with a pleasant and helpful woman named Laura and the Articles of Organization were published through AZcapitoltimes.com

Now I want to talk a bit about where we stand in the process and what the upcoming hurdles will likely be. First off, the bars are delicious, and I’m excited to have processed a sample order through the website.  Also, thinking about how to begin letting people know about Longbars has been some what of a challenge.  A month and a half ago I set (what seemed like) a very realistic personal goal of having the bars in hand by the first of November, and actually selling them by the first of December.

As it turns out, I may have given myself too much time to attain that second goal of selling the bars by the first of December… we’ll have to see at the end of the day. But I did learn an important lesson about setting goals: don’t set them too far apart, and try to articulate the goals more specifically. So, I’ll be working on that going forward.

Some good news on the sales front. There’s a good possibility that we’ll be selling the bars in a local nutrition shop that also sells Vibram’s awesome five-finger shoes (more on that in a later post). As more information becomes available about where Longbars are available I’ll be sure to spill the details.

Until then.

One philosophical ideal that Longbars embraces is the engagement of our community of visitors. The way seek to encourage community engagement is by using tools that already exist, and are minimally expensive.

What’s that mean?

For starters, let’s talk about what I mean by open source:

While the term is generally used to describe software licensing models, open source development has been around much longer than computers. Open source, as I’m using the word, describes a technology development methodology. At it’s heart, the open source method is about information sharing. Open information has been around since the beginning of human civilization and examples of that method can be found throughout history.

Historic examples of such information include: shoelace knots, agriculture, spoken or written language, and even things that are as old as breaking rocks to make cutting tools. All of these technologies were developed communally and have benefited human civilizations ever since.

As humans have used technology, we learned from it and improved upon our tools. Each new and improved technique is transmitted through the culture by its users. These tools eventually evolved to their present condition. Our tools have been passed to us from our ancestors through this open development model.

While there are plenty of reasons to use an open methodology, I’m only going to mention a few right now:

• First and foremost, while I’m highly motivated to develop a healthy meal replacement for myself and also tremendously interested in healthy life extension, I am not an expert in either of these fields. As such, I couldn’t expect a product that I designed by myself to be the best possible meal replacement. An open development system allows each customer to contribute to the final product, thereby ensuring that the final product has the greatest appeal and meets the dietary guidelines for naturally extending my healthy lifespan (and yours).
• Second, as a recent graduate and an entrepreneur who quit his full-time job, I could never afford buy all the tools necessary to start a business. If it weren’t for the software available from the community of open-source programmers at Ubuntu / KDE / etc, there’s no way I would have been able to afford to make it this far without stealing somebody’s copyrighted software. All of the software that has been used to develop the Longbars website and support the business have been provided for me at no charge. These developers have facilitated Longbars in almost every step along the way, whether they realize it or not. This is my attempt to reciprocate, by working with and cultivating productive relationships with a community interested in healthy life extension.
• Also, I see the open source approach to information as the best and fastest way to respond to our rapidly changing world. As humans tools advance and become more complex, our approaches to refining those tools will also need to change. Closed models of development can be successful, but they inhibit rapidity of adjustment by limiting the number of thinking minds that are able to contribute. If we want to keep up, I think we’ll need to change the way in which businesses operate. And I think we’ll see that means moving away from property rules which inhibit collaborative development.

As Longbars moves forward, you can expect to see significant changes and improvements to the recipe of the bar. The changes will come slow at first, but bear with us. And please, let us know if you have any questions or input.