Daily Dose of Pras

Ok. I’m a bit cagey when it comes to the specifics, but let’s talk brass tax for a moment: I lost 50 lbs in 8 months. And 8 months later, I’ve kept it off despite being a 26-year-old who guzzles soda, loves his pizza and Mickey D’s with great gusto, and has a weakness for apple fritters, Cinnabon, and all baked goods.

Here are 2 core weight loss strategies, and 5 surprising ones, that worked for me:

1.       Write down everything you eat

a.       I had never heard of this until I started the program, and was skeptical of it. I hated writing things down. I hated interrupting my day. I would report my weekly food logs to a dietician, and I’d half-ass the whole week’s logs the night before meeting with her, trying to reconstruct my week in food. But I soon came around. I also began to know calories off the top of my head. I started taking notes on my phone and logging it properly later. And now I find this is the core of my routine. Food logs are the core of how I lost weight. Weight loss is a highly emotional issue. We eat healthy when we feel like it. We eat poorly after a bad day. We eat cake because it’s someone’s birthday at work, and somehow it’s always SOMEONE’s birthday. We binge when we are frustrated or sad. We try to make good choices most of the time, and then we get frustrated when we don’t see results. Read the rest of this entry »

As working from home becomes more and more prevalent in our workforce, I’m confronted by my own experience with it. Big corporations tout words like work-life balance as a big reason to encourage their employees to work from home. Another might be that rather than offer free lunches, free dry-cleaning, massage chairs, or other such amenities on-site, just send them all home and let them recharge there. However, after working from quite a bit the past few years, I can tell you the switch is fraught with danger. It can be a drag on productivity. It can further blur the lines between when you’re working and when you’re not. And it’s open to abuse. Here are 6 tips to help.

1.       Work space and personal space.

Something that I learned all to well in college was that if I tried to study at home, I would often waste the entire day. It’s very important to change your physical environment. It’s the same reason doctors tell us not to have TVs in our bedrooms - bedrooms should be for sleeping (and perhaps other things) - but email in the bedroom and CNN in the bedroom is just not good for our mental and physiological health. The most productive days are the ones where I wake up, get out of the house early, and get to a Starbucks, or, in college, the library. The change in physical space makes a big difference. If you refuse to do this, at least chose a different space from the one where you relax. Most important here - when you enter your work-space, your personal life ends at the door. No kids, pets, or spouses allowed during work hours. Although in Don Draper fashion, I won’t fault you for the occasional vodka martini. On the other side of this statement lies the contrapositive point - when you leave your work-space - work stays behind. We live in a connected age, and research shows that people who are constantly tethered via mobile devices - the constant buzz of emails, texts, or IMs interrupting you as you focus on whatever - be it TV, significant other, or family - can damage your overall cognitive ability to focus. http://nyti.ms/cBH6mT

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Disclaimer: I usually don’t write personal posts on this blog - I save them for the other one that no one reads. But I’m trying something new. If this isn’t your particular brand of vodka, please skip.

It recently hit me - for the first time perhaps - that the reality of marriage isn’t all that far off. Whereas for girls my age, the prospect of marriage is already weighing on them, for most gentlemen I”m friends with, it’s something we don’t discuss, something that just isn’t a concern yet. I have always thought of marriage as something that comes in the distant future, after I grow up, almost as though it’s something that’ll happen to someone else - a different Prasid. A taller, skinnier, more-mature, successful, well-dressed Prasid in a black suit and red bowtie, marrying a beautiful and equally-successful, equally-tall girl in a red saree that matches his bowtie. I think perhaps this is part of some deeper problem - some inability to see the person I want to become, my goals and ambitions, and then connect that back to the life-path I’m currently on. Read the rest of this entry »